Fisher,+Ira+Joe

Biographical Information
Dates: 1947-  Dates in Ridgefield: 1990s-present

 poet, author, weather reporter, actor, Emmy Award recipient, college professor

 Ira Joe Fisher has been a TV weather reporter with a difference. The Buffalo-born journalist majored in Russian and drama, became a Texas radio disk jockey, wrote for a Spokane magazine, and eventually went to work as a weather and feature reporter for a Cincinnati TV station, winning two Emmys there for his writing. He moved to WABC-TV in New York in 1983, served as a weatherman and feature reporter and worked with Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford on //Live with Regis and Kathie//. He switched to WNBC for a while, and from 1999 to 2006 was the weather reporter for CBS’s //Saturday Early Show//. Mr. Fisher has also flirted with the stage: He performed off-Broadway in //The Fantastics// in 1996 and has appeared on the ABC daytime drama, //Loving;// appeared in the feature film //California Girls;// and the Broadway production of //The Prince and the Pauper.// However, in Ridgefield, to which he and his wife Sherry moved in the 1990s, he is well known as an emcee, volunteering his services for many fund-raising auctions and dinners. Mr. Fisher is also well-known as a poet and poetry lecturer and has given several lectures at the library on such topics as the nature of poetry and Robert Frost ("Frost is my god, my poetry god … He's just a wonderful home base for poetry."). He does readings of his own work, too. "Every day, I think, all of us see poetry," he told a library gathering in 1998. "Some of us are moved to make poetry out of what we see." Fisher frequently teaches at Pace University and the University of Connecticut.

//Songs From an Earlier Century, 2009 // Some Holy //Weight in the Village Air,// Air 2006 //Remembering Rew: Poems, // 2004 --Sources: Notable Ridgefielders-Jack Sanders; Facebook; Amazon
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