A 105-year-old Texas grandfather and retired plane designer will watch his 13th total solar eclipse on Monday after a lifetime of chasing the astronomical phenomenon.
LaVerne Biser has been an “eclipse chaser” since 1963 — when he packed his wife and three kids into a station wagon and drove nearly 2,000 miles from the Lonestar State to Maine to catch their first solar eclipse.
“That one eclipse was all it took,” Biser, who was 45 at the time, told the Washington Post last week. “I saw one and I had to see them all. I was hooked.”
Since that day, he’s been traveling the world to view as many solar eclipses as possible.
He and his late wife have been to Brazil, the Black Sea, the Virgin Islands and more in chase of the best viewpoint of different eclipses.
The last one he watched with his wife Marion, who died last year at age 97, was in 2017.
“It was a good one,” he said to Fox 4 Dallas.
Biser’s love for astronomy grew out of his interest in his high school science classes in the 1930s as a young teen in rural Ohio, where the stars and moon were bright above his family’s farmland.
He went on to earn a mechanical engineering degree from Ohio State University and had a career designing airplanes at General Dynamics near Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth.
All during that time, Biser was building his own telescopes and planning trips to different states and countries where a total solar eclipse would be the most visible.
His daughter, Carol Biser Barlow, 76, told the Washington Post that she’d been to 49 states by the time she finished high school thanks to the road trips the family would take for the eclipses.
Barlow, who is hosting her dad for his 13th eclipse, said her father’s love for the rare spectacles even influenced her wedding date.
“I told my parents about two possible dates for my wedding — one on June 3rd and one on July 8th,” she told the paper. “My dad said, ‘If you want me to give you away, you’ll have to pick the earlier date. I won’t be here on July 8th.’ He had an eclipse to get to.”
This weekend, the centenarian’s granddaughter is driving him from his Fort Worth Home to Barlow’s place in Plano, where the sun is expected to be completely blocked by the moon for a minute more.
To an eclipse lover, that one minute is “a big deal,” he told the newspaper.
Biser also knows this eclipse is special as he turns 106 in June and the next total solar eclipse visible from the US won’t be for another two decades.
“I probably won’t be around for the next one,” he said. “So I’m hoping the weather will cooperate long enough for me to see this one. I’m praying for clear weather.”
He hopes to capture what will likely be his last eclipse on camera. The walls of his home are lined with photographs of the dozen eclipses he’s already witnessed.
While he’s seen his fair share of total eclipses, Biser is far from jaded.
“It’s really something — there’s nothing like that dark sky in the middle of the day,” he told the paper. “I always feel like a lucky man when I see it. It reminds me that no matter where you are in life, we’re all just a little spot in the universe.”
