Growing To Stay Small
Optometrist Dr. Luke Small once spent three days scrubbing tiny flecks of paint from a parking lot full of cars at Speedy Muffler, the business formerly located next door to Armstrong and Small Eye Care Centre at 1140 Portage Avenue.
As a teenager put to work painting the building of the family business with a new paint sprayer, he’d paid scant attention to where the paint that didn’t hit the walls was drifting.
“It was a learning experience,” he said. Learning at work is an ongoing commitment for Small, if not quite to the same wax on/wax off level of elbow that life lesson provided.
From introducing new diagnostic equipment and patient management software, Small is motivated to find ways to carry the more than 100-year old practice into the future.
Small owns the eye care centre in partnership with optometrist Dr. Gina Mistretta Small. The two are married and parents to two children, ages 13 and 11.
And Dr. Armstrong? Well, he left the practice approximately 60 years ago. “Patients will come in and say they saw Dr. Armstrong last time,” but it’s one of the blips that arrive with a legacy name. Dr. Frank Armstrong was first licensed to practice optometry in Manitoba in 1916. In 1959, Luke’s grandfather, Dr. Donald Small, purchased his practice.
Luke’s father, Dr. Roderick Small, joined Donald’s practice in 1966. Roderick purchased the former Dominion Drugs in 1979, where the eye care centre has been headquartered since.
For those of you keeping track, that’s three generations of Small optometrists. With so many Smalls to go around, why do they continue to give Armstrong top billing?
For decades, it was because a name beginning with A meant your business was listed first in the Yellow Pages. Now it’s tradition. Gina also happens to be a third-generation optometrist. So far, their children haven’t declared an interest in pursuing the family business. There is still time, “but maybe it’s time to stop the insanity,” joked Small.
A wink to tradition also continues in the centre’s YouTube series, Eye Break, where Dr. Luke Small and Dr. Matthew Lepage employ a catch phrase used in the centre’s 1980s-era advertising, “Be wise, take care of your eyes.”
The level of care offered by optometrists and the technology used have been the biggest shifts to take place across the years. “Eyes tell us stuff,” said Small, and their health is tied to other conditions. “We fill a different role in the medical paradigm now.”
What Small’s father or grandfather would have referred out, he treats.
Chairside manner, however, remains the same. “People make it fun. It’s about creating relationships.”
All photos by Claudine Gervias
