Southern Utah Eye Care & Optical was founded by Dr. Sheldon Johnson in 1954 and is the longest-running optometry practice in Southern Utah by a wide margin. The address — 10 Diagonal Street, in central downtown St. George — is the same building that houses Wright Family Chiropractic upstairs, which makes Diagonal Street something of a long-tenured medical block all by itself.
Seventy-plus years on Diagonal Street
Founded the year Dwight Eisenhower started his second year as president, in a town then with a population well under 5,000, on a street that had been one of the original St. George grid’s odd diagonals for almost a century. The practice has now operated on the same Diagonal Street block across the entire post-war arc of the city’s growth — through Walmart’s arrival on Bluff in the 1990s, through the Bloomington and Little Valley build-outs, through the freeway-driven retiree wave that has tripled the city’s population. Most current patients have been seeing the practice across multiple optometrist generations; some second-generation patients are themselves now in their seventies.
What seventy years of continuity produces
Multi-decade single-location continuity creates a kind of patient-history depth that is functionally impossible to replicate in newer practices. Charts go back farther, family-history data accumulates across generations, and the institutional memory of how a particular family’s eye health has tracked across decades belongs to the practice in a way nothing newer can match.