Red Fisher

Who was Red Fisher?

Bernard Herbert "Red" Fisher was an American sporting goods retailer, U.S. naval and United States Coast Guard officer, newspaper columnist, and poet. With his gruff voice, he later became a popular radio and television personality in Canada.

Fisher was inducted into the U.S. based "Fishing Hall Of Fame" in 1948. When he moved to Canada in 1963, he launched what would become a popular radio talk show program The Red Fisher Show which moved to television in 1968. The TV version was set at fictitious "Scuttlebutt Lodge" and featured silent home movies of outdoors activities, often involving fishing, which involved high profile guests mainly from the major league sports of the era. Such guests included ice hockey stars Gordie Howe, Eddie Shack, and Johnny Bower, and baseball players 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. The series was an inspiration for the comedy television series The Red Green Show.

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 Fisher would famously give each guest on his show a copy of these poems. Three editions 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.