Red Fisher (sportsman)

Red Fisher (sportsman)

Bernard Herbert "Red" Fisher (18 February 1914 – 5 May 2006) was an American sporting goods retailer, U.S. naval and United States Coast Guard officer, newspaper columnist, and poet. He later became a popular radio and television personality in Canada. He is not to be confused with Montreal Gazette sports columnist, Red Fisher.

Fisher was inducted into the U.S. based "Fishing Hall Of Fame" in 1948. When he moved to Canada, he launched a popular radio talk show program The Red Fisher Show in 1963, which moved to television in 1968. The TV version was set at fictitious "Scuttlebutt Lodge" and featured silent home movies of outdoors activities, often fishing, which involved high profile guests, mainly from the major league sports of the era. These included ice hockey stars Gordie Howe, Eddie Shack, and Johnny Bower, and baseball legends Ted Williams, Roger Maris and Ferguson Jenkins. The Red Fisher Show differed from other outdoor living shows of its time by promoting nature conservation, game preservation and the "catch and release" mentality. The series continued until 1989, making it among the longest-running on CTV.

At the same time, his weekly column, Outdoor Topics, was read in over 180 newspapers. In 1971, Fisher's first book of poems, Poems Of Our Great Outdoors, was published and distributed. Red would famously give each guest on his show a copy of these poems. Three volumes of Poems Of Our Great Outdoors were released, each one simply adding more poems to the previous collection. Red released a record on Saga Records also called Poems of Our Great Outdoors in which he read his poems to a symphonic background.

In 2000, Red Fisher released a collection of stories and anecdotes from his life called Tight Lines and Tall Tales. A portion of the profits were donated to outdoor conservation efforts.

Fisher died in Chatham, Ontario at the age of 92. Red fisher is credited for introducing the open-faced spinning reel to North America and, as a result, was inducted into the Fishing Hall of Fame.