VAN NUYS : Activist Keeps on Fuming About Smoke

Call him Mr. No Secondhand Smoke if you will.

Back in the 1970s when Herm Perlmutter was a college student, he asked a young woman to dinner in a fancy restaurant.

“I didn’t want to be inundated with cigarette smoke,” Perlmutter said. So he called ahead to the upscale Van Nuys eatery to find a time when he and the woman he had met at Cal State Northridge could enjoy a smoke-free, romantic meal.

“They told me Monday, at 3 p.m.,” he recalled, and when the couple arrived, they were seated in the middle of the main room of the restaurant. The host then proceeded to seat smokers in a circle around Perlmutter and his date.

That was the beginning of the war for him.

“Something snapped,” he said, recalling how it was the fury he felt from this incident that spurred him to become a nonsmokers’ rights activist.

Today, Perlmutter is the associate executive director of the American Cancer Society San Fernando Valley Unit in Van Nuys, and can look back over almost 20 years of a war fought against secondhand smoke.

His early efforts met with limited success. Right after graduating from college, he wrote and coordinated the first nonsmokers’ rights initiative--which would have required separate nonsmoking sections in restaurants, supermarkets and health care facilities. It went nowhere.

But although the measure never made it to the ballot, Perlmutter savored the victory of getting 250,000 signatures with a meager budget of $2,500.

After he realized that he became ill when he was around cigarette smoke, Perlmutter in 1975 joined GASP (Group Against Smoking Pollution), a San Fernando Valley activist organization.

As he continued his activism through the American Lung Assn. and later the American Cancer Society, Perlmutter authored and lobbied for a number of anti-secondhand-smoke policies, watching as many of them were defeated through what he sees as underhanded tactics used by the tobacco industry.

During the final week of the 1980 campaign for Proposition 10--which would have required separate non-smoking sections in public places--Perlmutter watched an anti-Proposition 10 television ad in which a police officer slapped handcuffs on a smoker at a sports event.

Before the ads were aired, the polls showed that the public was in favor of the proposition by 53%, but ultimately voted against it. “I still feel sickened,” Perlmutter said. “They won by lying to the public.”

Perlmutter’s current battle is focused on Proposition 188, which is sponsored by Philip Morris and would overturn the statewide law recently signed by Gov. Pete Wilson banning smoking in most public places.