David Lasser Still Touting Visions at 90

Visionary, writer and retired labor organizer David Lasser has been getting into fixes all his life. At age 90, that’s a lot of fixes.

As an underage soldier in France, he was gassed. As a science fiction magazine editor, he invented theories on travel to the moon. As a community advocate of research, he argued for low-emission lights in San Diego County to help astronomers on Palomar Mountain peer farther into the cosmos.

“He’s always gone into controversy with both feet,” friend and Rancho Bernardo neighbor Alex Summers said.

On Friday, Lasser was guest of honor at a birthday luncheon at the Rancho Bernardo Country Club attended by 90 of his family members and closest friends. It was a cakeless affair and, true to form, a bit unorthodox in content and style.

In a short program, Lasser’s niece performed a ballad composed by Lasser when he was a love-smitten government administrator in Paris after World War II. A nephew also recited a poem--a lyrical challenge of the cosmic order--written by Lasser at the wide-eyed and headstrong age of 77.

Sandwiched between the poached salmon and fried ice cream were stories from a gloriously checkered past. Those who know him have come to expect the unexpected from a man whose philosophy has been to venture where his heart and imagination dare.

“The attractive thing about David is you never quite know what he’s going to do next,” said James Arnold, a friend and professor at the Space Institute at UC San Diego.

Born in Baltimore on March 20, 1902, to an immigrant family from the Russian city of Kovno, Lasser grew up in poverty with six brothers and sisters. After half a year in high school, Lasser told his lie and enlisted in the Army in 1917. Upon returning from battle, he ignored his incomplete high school history and talked his way into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1924, he graduated with an engineering degree and a wide-open future. He became editor of two science fiction magazines, “Science Wonder Stories” and “Air Wonder Stories.” He had seemingly found the perfect medium for his flights of fancy.

However, through his own research, Lasser found a subject more compelling than the fictitious accounts he edited. He became intrigued by the real possibility of space travel. Perhaps his wildest and greatest prediction was made in his book, “Conquest of Space,” a seminal research work on travel to the moon.

It was 1931, and the public thought he was crazy.

“I had my convictions,” Lasser said in an interview before the luncheon. “I just had to assume that the truth would work itself out.”

With colleagues at the magazines, he founded the American Interplanetary Society, the first U.S. organization to promote space travel. The group evolved into the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, which now boasts 40,000 members, including researchers, engineers and high-ranking NASA officials, most of whom have paid homage to Lasser for his nascent musings on space exploration.

Quite a change from 1941, when Lasser was jeered publicly for his theories during congressional hearings on a government job appointment. He lost the job. Decades later, Lasser received an apology from President Jimmy Carter for the slights.

Much of the criticism Lasser received was fallout from his work in organized labor. During the Great Depression, Lasser formed the Workers Alliance, a union-like organization of 4 million unemployed workers, and he later became the founder and president of the International Union of Electrical Workers, which he headed for 19 years until retiring in 1969.

Retirement affords him little rest, however, having since founded a continuing adult education center in Rancho Bernardo, said Alex Summers, president of the center, an affiliate of San Diego State University. At age 89, Lasser taught a six-week course on one of his favorite topics, the origin of the universe.

And he has waged battles on a localized scale. In the early 1980s, he became an advocate of street light regulation in San Diego, when light “pollution,” or diffusion, hampered telescopic work at Palomar Observatory.

The position he took on behalf of dark skies was not universally embraced, but his eloquent plea on behalf of scientific counterparts at Palomar won over the public, and the city opted for Lasser’s choice of the dimmer, low-sodium lighting, Arnold said.

On Friday, Lasser dropped a theoretical bombshell, as he expounded on an interpretation of the creation of the universe that butts up against the commonly held Big Bang and Constant State theories. Lasser said scientists should operate on the theory that multiple universes exist, and space travel and communication should move toward contact with life forms more advanced than those on Earth.

“Although to us our Earth may seem great, in comparison with the immense other bodies so profuse, ours is actually like a bit of sand on an immense shore,” he said.

“In all the billions upon billions of planetary bodies in space, there may well be many where . . . there is an opportunity for us to learn the secret for a higher level of human development.”

Although Friday’s audience was receptive, Lasser said he knows the rest of the public may be more skeptical.

“What I have to say will have a negative effect on some, I would suspect,” Lasser said. “There will be people who think it’s all a bunch of crap.”

Lasser’s met them before.