Some 70 years ago, Merv Fisher walked away from his studies at Rio Vista High School to go to war.
Monday at Granbury Villa Nursing Home, he celebrated academic closure.
With Fisher’s family beaming approval, Rio Vista school board President David Brunson and interim Superintendent Steve Madson presented the 86-year-old veteran with a personalized, leather-bound RVISD diploma.
“Well, I don’t know that I earned it,” Fisher said, “It was just a matter of [the Rio Vista educators] wanted to give it to me, and I felt with the additional education I had, I deserved it as much as anybody else. I served on about four different islands in the South Pacific.”
He was not Rio Vista’s most gifted student in the late ’30s, he acknowledged.
“I liked some parts of school. Math is probably the reason I didn’t graduate,” Fisher said.
Like most growing boys, he was into athletics. His specialty was track.
“I remember I ran up and down an old dirt road training for the half-mile,” Fisher said. “I was so skinny that’s all I could qualify for. I had my clock tied to the fence while I ran so I’d know what my time was.”
He put on a show.
“But there wasn’t no crowd,” he said with a grin.
He said he remembered a Rio Vista teacher named Ewing.
“We called her an old maid. The man who did biology was connected with Tarleton [junior college]. The school, as I remember it, was two-story brick. It was a pretty nice building. I’ve seen it since then but haven’t been inside. I remember the grocery and drug store.”
In an era when students attended only through 11th grade, Fisher was in school at Rio Vista for “parts of two years,” he said. Before that, he was a Cleburne student for about a year.
“I lived out off Parker Road,” Fisher said. “We were pretty poor, but so was everybody else. My uncle still lived at home. There were seven or eight of us. My daddy worked for John Shelton, who sold mules to the Army. He was down there on South Main. I tagged along and got 50 cents or a dollar every once in a while. I remember we lived in a little house on a hill. I got my daddy’s car while he was gone on a job one time and drove it back and forth across the road going down to the water well. I didn’t have permission.”
He recalled a nearby family named McClellan.
“The boy was tall and lanky and four years older than me,” Fisher said. “Him and his daddy were down at the highway, as we called it.”
For Fisher, youth ended about 1940.
“I volunteered for the D Battery artillery there in Cleburne,” he said. “When they mobilized, we lived in the barracks. We were told we could get out or stay if we were underage. I never thought about leaving. They paid me $21 a month. I started out in the Army. I transferred over to the Army Air Force.”
He was back in Johnson County in 1945, just in time to meet his future wife, Dorothy Lay of Joshua. They’ve been married 63 years.
“Merv and I met in October of 1945,” she said. “They needed single, young women to go to dances with guys coming back from the war. I was available, so I was his date.”
“Rio Vista Graduation” was a big day for Merv Fisher, his wife said.
“He saw it mentioned in the newspaper and asked our son [Jerry] to call. I got all the papers together. It’s taken a while to get it all organized. But didn’t it turn out lovely?”
Johnson County
Related Photos
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Merv Fisher, 86, is ready to cut the cake during his graduation party at Granbury Villa Nursing Home on Monday. Fisher was presented a diploma by Rio Vista ISD, which he attended in 1939 before going off to war. Pete Kendall/Times-Review
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Rio Vista student gets diploma 70 years later
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