Biography

Fred Lasswell Jr. was born on July 25, 1916 in Kennett, Missouri, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie (1972), Draw and Color Funny Doodles with Uncle Fred (1990) and People on Paper (1945). He was married to Shirley Slesinger. He died on March 4, 2001 in Tampa, Florida, USA.

Invented a citrus fruit harvester, a technique to enable the blind to read comics, a bilingual laser disc, and a hypercard stack for computers.

His widow, Shirley Slesinger, is the widow of Steven Slesinger, who secured the North American rights to merchandise the Winnie The Pooh characters from A.A. Milne in 1929. She has been in litigation against the Walt Disney Company since 1991 over royalties from videos, games and DVDs she claims the company has cheated her out of based on a contract negotiated by Walt Disney himself in 1961 (such a provision was not written into that contract, but lawyers for the Slesinger family contend those monies were promised). On 29 March 2004 a Los Angeles Superior Court judge dismissed the case, contending the family altered confidential memos and covered up the theft of documents obtained from Disney's trash. The Slesingers say they intend to appeal.

Assistant to Billy DeBeck, creator of the comic strip "Barney Google." Lasswell took over the strip after DeBeck's death in 1942.