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BOB FISHER: STOVE KING

Bob Fisher is the product of a simple, basic rural life along the northwest Oregon coast. He grew up learning hard work and acquiring common sense from his parents . . . farmers who were just trying to survive the depression years of the 1930's.

"I remember the chickens, cattle, pigs, groves of walnuts and filberts . . . and all those turkeys. We had over 4,000 turkeys at one time," Bob likes to tell his friends. "The parts of farm life that stick in my memory the most were either lots of hard work or lots of fun . . . but there was never a dull moment."

Bob didn't like school very much and missed many classes while working in his parent's orchard. Finally, in the middle of the eleventh grade, he couldn't take it anymore and dropped out. For several years after that he continued to help his parents ... then eventually started an independent logging operation of his own.

Fisher later went broke one year when his log tractor got mired so deep in the Oregon mud that he couldn't get it out for weeks . . . so Bob went on from there to try his hand at being a barber, millwright, and-finally-a welder. He didn't know it then . . . but his fortuneat lastwas close at hand.

"My wife and I bought an A-frame up in the mountains about that time, and it had a huge stone fireplace," Bob recalls. "It sure was romantic, but that damn thing burned about a cord of wood a week and sucked all the warm air out of the house as it drew cold air in from the outside. I think it worked more like a refrigeration unit than a heater!

"I just got tired of burning all that wood . . . and that's how my stove idea got started," Fisher says as he muses over those early days on the mountain . . . thinking of how back-tonature to him meant freezing his behind off while scorching his boots in front of that mammoth fire.

Ol' Ben Franklin must have had similar thoughts one cold Pennsylvania winter nearly 200 years before when he came up with his stove idea. And Bob, like Ben, had enough sense to put his mind to work solving the centuries-old problem: How do you heat a large room . . . the easiest, most economical way possible . . . with the simplest, most basic firebox?

It wasn't long before Bob Fisher was kindling his stone fireplace with scraps of drawing paper . . . on which were sketched rough ideas for his new Fisher Stove. "I just drew it up and built it," Bob says. "I knew in my mind exactly how it would work, and sure enough, when I got through welding those pieces of iron together, it did work!

"We sealed up the old fireplaceexcept for a 6inch opening in the chimney for a flue-then I put that first stove in place," says Fisher. "It heated the entire A-frame, and we had 100r/, flame control. The stove was just a little slower to react than a gas or oil furnace, but we could turn the wood flame up or down anytime we wanted . . . and we could cook right on top of it! "

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