Last in Space: Astronomy Expert Retires : Science: Jim Lund ends 35 years at the El Camino College planetarium, closing out his four-times-a-week tours of the universe with schoolchildren.

Jim Lund doesn’t have a bunch of diplomas from famous universities hanging on his office wall at El Camino College in Torrance. He isn’t a member of prestigious international scientific societies. He hasn’t won a Nobel Prize.

Nevertheless, Lund has made a contribution of potentially immeasurable importance in the field of astronomy: Over the past two decades he has taken more than 100,000 South Bay schoolchildren on tours of the universe, introducing them to the wonders and mysteries of constellations and comets, meteors and Mars, the space shuttle and space probes.

Four times a week for the past 20 school years, children from the third grade through high school have had an opportunity to listen to Lund talk about the heavens and watch as he and his planetarium machines cast images of those heavens on the 30-foot wide planetarium dome above their heads. They have heard him, a man without extensive formal scientific training, tell them: “Science is fun; don’t let science scare you.” On Friday nights, members of the general public have packed Lund’s planetarium shows to hear him talk about galaxies and Halley’s comet and the eternal question, “Are we alone in the universe?”

But now the 61-year-old planetarium manager at El Camino College is giving his last planetarium show. Lund is retiring after 35 years at the college, and it seems likely that when he’s gone, the free planetarium shows for schoolchildren, and the low-cost Friday night shows for the general public, will be gone as well.

“It’s been a lot of fun,” says Lund. “But I guess all things have to come to an end.”

Although Lund, a friendly and unassuming man, tends to downplay the importance of his role at the college and the impact of his leaving, others do not.

“He’s a cornerstone of this college,” Prof. Bruce Fitzpatrick, faculty coordinator of the math and physical sciences division, says of Lund. “We’re really very upset about losing him. It’s a terrible loss. He is an exceptional man.”

Fitzpatrick said the budget crunch facing California higher education in general, and El Camino College in particular, makes it unlikely that the vacancy left by Lund will be filled. Therefore, public access to the planetarium probably will effectively cease.

Lund’s interest in astronomy began when he was a boy growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y. He remembers being fascinated when his parents took him to a planetarium. Later, after he moved to San Pedro as a teen-ager, he would ride and hike up to Mt. Wilson to hang around with the astronomers at the observatory there.

After a stint in the Air Force with a forward air controller unit during the Korean War, Lund returned to Los Angeles and attended El Camino College, eventually getting an associate of arts degree in electronics. Later he attended Cal State Long Beach in the hopes of getting a bachelor of science degree, but he never finished.

Although his formal training ended there, Lund’s education did not. He continued his self-study of astronomy, a course he never finished, and never will. There is, he says, always something else to learn.

After all, he says, “When you’re giving a show, you’d better know what you’re talking about.”

In 1956 Lund got a job as head technician at El Camino’s physics department, setting up equipment and materials in the laboratory. In 1969, when the college’s planetarium was being built, Lund says, “I kept coming over and sticking my nose in here, looking around.”

His interest in the planetarium, and in astronomy, paid off. In 1973 he became manager of the planetarium, and although it wasn’t really a requirement of the job, he started giving the astronomy lectures that an entire generation of South Bay schoolchildren have become familiar with. In addition to lecturing, Lund works the electronic console that controls the light projections that create a visual universe on the dome of the planetarium.

Unlike some planetariums that rely on prerecorded lectures to accompany their planetarium shows, Lund says he thinks it’s vitally important to have a live lecturer--especially for children, whose minds might wander away from a taped presentation.

“Elementary school kids are a clean slate,” Lund says. “It’s fun when you can reach them. But it’s essential to have a live lecturer, someone they can focus on. And you have to show enthusiasm for your subject. If you just drone on, you’ll put people to sleep.”

In some ways, Lund says, the fact he is a self-taught astronomer may have been an advantage in his lectures.

“You can appreciate the subject matter from a layman’s point of view,” Lund says. “Sometimes a scientific person can be too precise in one area; they don’t take a broad enough view.”

And what will Lund, a Torrance resident, do in retirement?

“I’ve got a house that needs attention, and hobbies I’ve been ignoring for years,” says Lund, who lives with his wife Peggy in the house that Lund’s father, a carpenter, built in the 1950s. He said photography, and building and repairing clocks are his favorite hobbies. “And, of course, I’ll still be interested in astronomy.

“But I’ll miss the (planetarium) shows,” Lund says. “I’ll definitely miss them.”

Chances are he won’t be the only one.