Captain Huff-and-Puff : Inveterate smoker Walt Netschert of Orange has designed a fan-equipped helmet to let nicotine addicts and those he has dubbed Fresh Air Freaks peaceably coexist. But he has had very few takers.

Did you ever have a space helmet as a kid? One you could put on and suddenly become invincible, impervious to the forces aligned against you?

Meet Walt Netschert. Though well into his 60s, he also has a spacey helmet he dons when beset by foes. Unlike kids and their imaginary villains, Netschert--though aided by a sense of humor--is dead serious about feeling oppressed by very real villains.

They are FAFs, the people he calls Fresh Air Freaks. He calls his helmet the E-7 Equalizer Ecology Hat, and, like all good super-heroes, has a name for himself as well, Captain Huff-and-Puff. He derives his powers from cigarettes.

Netschert smokes, and has since he was an engineering student in college.

“I didn’t start to look smart or be part of a group,” he explained. “In my junior year, the dean of engineering called me in and said, ‘The instructors have all been talking about you because you’re puzzling to us. Your class participation is fine, your homework, reports and lab stuff are super-good, but you get a test and you struggle to get a C-minus. Why?’

“I told him, ‘My head goes faster than my hand.’ I’d work a problem through, but my hand wouldn’t keep up, and I’d have to start over, and it made me nervous. He said, ‘Well, your head has to have patience for your hand to catch up. Try either a glass of wine or a cigarette before a test.’ It made all the difference in the world.”

Had Netschert chosen differently, he might now be trying to market the Ecology Wine Hat. But cigarettes it was.

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“I find them highly beneficial to my way of performing,” he said. “With tobacco I can settle my nerves down and think methodically and in order, and without it what happens then is 15 minutes is OK, but then my thoughts lose focus on what’s going on, and I start thinking about having a cigarette maybe. Then another 15 minutes go by and I start getting a post-nasal drip, that turns into tears as big as light bulbs and choking, and it gets worse from there.”

In recent years he has found old clients wouldn’t hire him if he smoked at their facilities. Favorite restaurants would no longer seat him. He can’t even light up at an Angel game anymore.

So the engineer turned inventor and made his special hat. A clear plastic shield forms an isolation zone in front of the smoker’s face, complete with ashtray and a clip that will hold either a cigarette or a cigar. As long as the smoker keeps his lit cigarette in that zone, and is careful to exhale upward, Netschert claims the smoke won’t be a problem to anyone else.

A fan pulls it up and through two filters, and there’s even an optional perfumed scent packet. The fan is reversible, so the hat can conversely serve as an air filter for smoke- or pollen-sensitive persons. It runs on batteries, off a wall socket or a car cigarette lighter. Netschert refers to his invention as a “peace pipe for the ‘90s.”

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He’s a likable man with a sense of humor broad enough to include his own creations. We met in an Anaheim coffee shop, in the smoking section. He demonstrated his E-7 hat, and even to a smoke-sensitive dweeb like me, it appeared to work. He contentedly puffed away on his long More cigarettes behind his plastic shield, accompanied by the whine of the fan, and there was no outward-bound smoke or smell to speak of.

He designed the hat in 1989 while doing an in-house engineering project for Disney Imagineering. He had already found a way to smoke on the job, by setting up his office in a custodian’s closet beneath a stairwell, but he was going nuts not being able to smoke at a four-hour weekly meeting. So he devised the hat and was then allowed to puff and whir away at the meetings.

So far the only Ecology hats extant are 10 prototypes, some of formed cardboard and a couple of plastic. He has been trying to interest investors and has charts predicting 250,000 sales of the projected $79.95 hat in its first year of manufacture alone. He thinks it’s a conservative estimate that one in 250 of the nation’s estimated 42 million smokers will buy one.

When he exhibited the hat at a 1989 invention exhibition, Netschert says a prominent Japanese inventor told him he’d do well with his product in Japan. About the only American interest he has received, though, was an invitation to appear on “The Tonight Show,” which he did in November, 1989.

He has tried to interest domestic manufacturers to no avail, and his appeals to the tobacco industry have been similarly ignored. Earlier this month, he rented an Anaheim conference room to demonstrate his product and ideas relating to it. Despite sending invitations to tobacco company representatives and a host of others, the conference “fell right out of bed,” with no one showing up.

He thinks that is because smokers are now vocally outnumbered 4 to 1 in the United States, and because the tobacco industry is so busy racking up export sales that it has abandoned smokers in this country.

There may be yet another reason though, one right in front of him.

His hat may work wonderfully, saving smokers from being ostracized and saving others from the smoke, but it looks utterly ridiculous.

Netschert had a color brochure made featuring his Equalizer Ecology hats, with photos of a female model using the hat--actually a slightly boxier E-5 prototype--in a variety of lifelike situations: shopping, dining, working and driving. I’ve shown this brochure to dozens of people now, and each time it has inspired incredulity and laughter.

“This is a joke, right?” “It looks like ‘Robocop Goes to Ralphs’.” “Is this the new Cone of Silence, Chief?” were among the responses.

In the restaurant, I tried on one of Netschert’s E-7s, and felt rather like I was wearing an In ‘N’ Out Burger stand on my head. I asked three women at a nearby table to tell me, on a scale of one to 10, just how ridiculous I looked, and got unanimous 10s. I’ll admit to usually getting the same response without the hat, but it sure didn’t help any.

Even the generally gracious Johnny Carson told Netschert, “You look very silly. You know that, don’t you?”

He does know that, conceding that his hats are “uglier than sin.” But so, he argues, was the Volkswagen Bug, and people came to love it.

But Volkswagen didn’t have the hurdle of getting folks to wear the Bug on their heads. Picture Bogart and Bacall in a romantic clinch with their cigarettes. Then picture them in the Equalizer Ecology Hat. Then picture them with Volkswagens on their heads. The Volkswagen wins, doesn’t it?

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Netschert is willing to risk appearing silly if it enables him to make his point. He recognizes that there are persons who are genuinely sensitive to smoke, “but the majority group of nonsmokers are just the complainers. They don’t like the thought of people smoking, the sight of it.”

Netschert doesn’t encourage others to smoke and says he saw to it that his two sons didn’t smoke. But he does . He likes to, and feels he has to in order to function. And everywhere he turns he sees his preferred pleasure being denied, needlessly he feels.

So he blows smoke in his hat in places where smoking isn’t allowed, wearing the E-7 in restaurants, malls and even airplanes, without hearing complaints, he said.

His goal is to form Puffin’ Posses, where he, under the name Captain Huff-and-Puff, and others will target certain no-smoking venues (not, he said, ones where smoking is a fire-code violation) by going there en masse and lighting up under his hats. If the venues refuse to let them smoke even if the hats filter all particulates and odors from the air, then Netschert will publicly dub them Fresh Air Freaks. He’s even sent invitations to smoking celebrities he hopes will join him under the E-7.

“Imagine Clint Eastwood comin’ atcha down the street wearing one. Hah!” he said.

In his ideal world, if smokers were in the minority in a workplace, they’d wear the hats. If nonsmokers were the minority, they’d wear the hats, having reversed the fan so it would filter the smoky air. Peace would reign.

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Does he worry that by removing some of the social stigma from smoking, he might encourage others to smoke?

“That’s not the intent at all. It’s just to support the rights of smokers. Don’t make them stand outside where they can’t do their work. Don’t let them get kicked out of a profession as I was, and others are.”

He has yet to develop any smoking-related illnesses, and said that’s an individual risk. He discounts the risks of second-hand smoke.

“Good gosh, the Good Lord put those killer bones in fish too, and it’s up to the individual whether they want to eat fish. I know a guy who has ingested a couple of decent shots of cyanide and lived though it. I think our maker gave us a system that rejects reasonable amounts of impurities, and secondary smoke I think is a reasonable amount.”

Some smokers, he thinks, die of broken hearts. Netschert showed a letter he had written to an Orange drugstore about a deceased smoker who had staked out a spot at the counter for years until the store limited his smoking area. He was moved to a distant booth, and he died a month later, Netschert said:

Good People, I know it broke Tex’s heart, his spirit, his self-esteem and perhaps even his will to live when he lost his right to smoke at his end-stool spot. At that spot it was comfortably natural for him to meet and blend with others such as myself and to feel like an equal integral part of society instead of being a lonely minority outcast at a remote table. I know that lonely squeezed-out feeling as well. In his memory I suggest dedicating the end seat to his kind with a little sign on the back: Reserved for Friends of Tex, Smokers Only.

He got no reply. He usually doesn’t, he said, and is particularly incensed with the cold shoulder his entreaties have gotten from the tobacco industry. He thought it would be in the industry’s best interest to see his product on the market, and to advertise it, for a royalty, on their cigarette cartons. He said he may have to turn to Japan to get his product manufactured. “It’s so politically charged here. Nonsmokers don’t want anything to interfere with their thinking that it’s bad, bad, bad. And they sure don’t want to approve of someone and their right to smoke. Then the tobacco industry is so content with the way they’re making bucks with their exports they won’t to get embroiled in this domestic folderol. So two major block factions stand in the way in this country.”

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In the meantime, Netschert soldiers on with his remaining Equalizer Ecology Hat prototypes--he sent one to a nephew with allergies and another to a woman he saw on Oprah whose smoking was an issue in her custody battle--hoping to win back his place at the table of American life.

He’s finding that without his hats there’s scarcely a spot where he can enjoy a peaceful puff anymore.

“I was in the hospital for hip surgery a while back,” he recalled. “It was 3 a.m. I was the only one in the room, there was no one stirring in the hall, my curtain was pulled partway around the bed. ‘Now is my time to savor that cigarette I brought with me.’ I dampened a Kleenex to use as an ashtray, lit up and I had four puffs--they were worthwhile --and I hear footsteps hastening toward me. They can’t be coming after me! But sure as hell, from maybe 50 yards away this nurse comes in, opens the curtain grabs my cigarette and flushes it down the toilet.”