Gayle Morrow
Lifetime triumph: Ed proudly displays his 2014 Denis McCormick Award for lifetime achievement from the Triumph National Rally.
Of Bikes and Men
Fast Eddie Fisher, WWII Veteran and Motorcyclist Extraordinaire, Reminisces By Gayle Morrow
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hunk resident David E. Fisher, AKA Ed or Fast Eddie, can be forgiven if he can’t recall the entirety of his experiences as a World War II Army combat veteran. But, at ninety-three, he’s got a fairly extensive collection of memories from those years. Ed, born in 1925 Lancaster County, was one of thirteen children in the Fisher family. He served in the Army from 1943 to 1947, where he trained as a mechanic but ended up as a Jeep driver for his company commander. Ed counts himself lucky to have been ordered in that direction, as, otherwise, he would likely have been with other members of his company who were killed in a training accident. He saw action in the Battle of the Bulge, which was the last German offensive campaign on the Western Front, got frostbitten feet, and recalls that, after crossing the Rhine in an amphibious vehicle, he picked up a wounded German soldier and subsequently delivered him to
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a medical facility. The soldier—whether by accident or design—happened to leave his briefcase and his service pistol behind. Ed still has the pistol. To hold it serves as tangible evidence of a horrific time, even as the living memory of those days slips away. He can also tell you about being in General Dwight Eisenhower’s honor guard in Berlin during the last months of 1945. Ike, he says, “was a very nice man.” Berlin, at the time, was “in shambles.” At any rate, the war ended, and Ed found himself on the Queen Mary, an ocean liner designed to carry 3,000 but which, for this voyage, was packed to the gills with 17,000 homeward bound soldiers—men and women both, although Ed notes a bit wryly that “we never saw the women.” A parade planned in New York City was postponed for a week, he says, until the Queen Mary arrived. From New York, Ed went to Fort Indiantown Gap for his discharge. There were two lines there to process the outgoing soldiers, he
says—one, the shorter line, for those who had no issues, no complaints, and a longer line for those who may have had a medical problem or other reason they may have needed to file the dreaded extra paper work. Despite having had, in his words, “frozen feet,” Ed picked the short line. Let me outa here, right? How did Ed Fisher celebrate his homecoming? He ordered a new Indian Chief. If you’re not a bike enthusiast, you may not know that Indian was America’s first motorcycle company. It was also the first motorcycle Ed bought, back in 1941, before the Army and the war. A friend of his also had an Indian racing bike, and Ed remembers, with a bit of a twinkle in his eye, that he “rode it long enough to blow it up.” Because of the war, this new Indian was on backorder, so it was seven months before it arrived. When it showed up, the first place he went with it was to Langhorne, Pennsylvania, to a 100-mile race. It was good to be home.