Ernest G. Fischer was born October 7, 1902, on a farm near Bartlett, Texas. He began his association with newspapers early, working as a printer's devil on the Bartlett Tribune while still in high school. After graduation in 1921, he attended the universities of Missouri and Texas and in 1925 received his Bachelor of Journalism degree from Missouri. This launched Fischer into a reporting career with a series of newspapers in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and the state of Texas. A change of pace came when he worked as a seaman in 1934, but he soon returned to reporting, and by 1936 was Associated Press editor in Dallas, Texas.
In 1940, Fischer entered the international scene with his appointment as an Associated Press correspondent in Germany. This led to his internment at Bad Nauheim as an enemy alien after Pearl Harbor. Repatriated in May 1942, he returned to Dallas for two years and then was back in Europe, again as a correspondent to serve in London, Vienna, and Switzerland. He was United Nations correspondent, 1947-1948, and was head of the Associated Press bureau covering the Winter Olympics in Switzerland in 1948. In 1949, he returned to the United States and positions as editor and newsman with the Associated Press in New Orleans until his retirement in 1967. He also pursued a second career, education which he began on a part-time basis in 1954. He lectured in journalism at Tulane University, 1954-1963; and at West Texas State University, Canyon, Texas, from September 1967 to May 1968. Fischer died in 1997.
