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. With his gruff voice, he later became a popular radio and television personality in Canada.

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.

Fisher was inducted into the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame in 1988. In 2000, he released a collection of stories and anecdotes from his life called Tight Lines and Tall Tales (ISBN 9780968976104). A portion of the profits were donated to outdoor conservation efforts.

Fisher died in Chatham, Ontario at the age of 92.

The Red Green Show, created by Canadian comedian Steve Smith, was a spoof of Fisher's several TV titles, some incarnations of which were Tall Tale Adventures and Our Great Outdoors.

Canadian comedy show SCTV spoofed The Red Fisher Show in a skit called The Fishin' Musician in which John Candy played a Red Fisher-like character and featured numerous musical acts.

Canadian comedy troupe The Frantics mention Fisher in their sketch, Heaven is for Presbyterians. In the sketch, the archangel Gabriel tells a Catholic trying to get into Heaven that following the tenets of his religion was useless, and that he "may as well have stayed home and watched Red Fisher."

A parody booklet of humorous rhymes, Wild Poems by B.S. 'Fred' Risher, was another project his legacy inspired.