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SALT LAKE CITY — John Moran, who used his business fortune to help create the University of Utah's nationally ranked eye center which bears his name, has died, university officials said. He was 91.
Moran died "peacefully" on Saturday while surrounded by his family, university officials said Wednesday. A cause of death was not released.
"John's death leaves a huge hole in our hearts," Dr. Randall Olson, CEO at the University of Utah John A. Moran Eye Center, said in a statement. "We all share in the loss of this amazing man."
Moran was born in Los Angeles in 1932 and moved to Salt Lake City when he was in elementary school after his father, a self-taught accountant, accepted a vending job in Utah, according to a biography of him compiled by the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, which honored him in 2012. His father helped him learn accounting, which Moran said "had a great influence" on him.
In fact, Moran left the University of Utah to take over his father's company after his father died from cancer, and later merged it with another company before taking correspondence courses to finish his degree in banking and finance.
He eventually went on to work for the New York-based investment banking firm Blyth and Company before leaving in 1967 for Dyson-Kissner Corporation, a private international holding company. He became the company's president and CEO in 1975 and remained with the company as a chairman until his retirement in 1998.
The company's name changed to include Moran's name by then, as he had become a partner.
Moran was also helping the University of Utah build an eye center, after meeting Olson through the university's National Advisory Council. He funded the center's first building in the 1990s and helped fund its current location, which opened in 2006.
U.S. News & World Report named the center as the 10th-best hospital for ophthalmology in a report released this year.
"When Dr. Olson told me about his dream to carry out research that might someday restore vision to the blind, it brought to my mind stories from the Bible that my mother had read to me as a child," Moran once said, according to the center. "One of the reasons the Moran Eye Center exists is because my mother planted within me a belief in miracles."
Moran also served as the Republican Party's national finance chairman at one point, and helped with Bob Dole and John McCain's campaign finances during their respective presidential runs in 1996 and 2008.
He is survived by his wife Carole as well as his daughters, Kellie, Marisa and Elizabeth, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
"He was a true friend with a desire to help others, and his dedication to our vision to provide hope, understanding and treatment deeply motivated me, and everyone at Moran, to strive for excellence," Olson said. "We share our condolences with the Moran family ... and we are thankful to be a part of his legacy."
