His work attracted the attention of Billy DeBeck, creator of the newspaper strip 'Barney Google', in 1933. Fred Lasswell became his assistant, and took over the famous strip after DeBeck's death in 1942. During World War II, Fred Lasswell served as a flight radio operator and created the strip 'Sgt. Hashmark'. Apart from working in comics, he was an inventor, coming up with a successful citrus fruit harvester, a technique to enable the blind to read comics, a bilingual laser disc and a hypercard stack for computers. He also produced a series of videos for children, called 'Draw and Color with Uncle Fred'.