Deceased September 11, 1990
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In Memory
Fred Fischer died on Sept. 11, 1990, at the end of a painful two-and-one-half-year argument with cancer of the liver. Reason lost. It makes no sense that so vigorous a mind and so large a heart should get cancer, and then that science can do nothing for it.
He was born Jan. 29, 1949, in St. Paul, M.N., to John and Jeanne (Kerridge) Fischer. Fred attended the St. Paul Academy and graduated cum laude in 1967. He entered Amherst with the Class of 1971 and majored in religion. He was on the dean’s list every semester and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated magna cum laude and was elected by his class to speak at senior exercises preceding Commencement. He also was a member of the search committee formed upon the resignation of Calvin Plimpton which nominated Bill Ward for the Amherst presidency.
In 1972 he returned to St. Paul, campaigned for and became an aide to the first term Mayoralty of Larry D. Cohen. Fred received the Master of Public Policy degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government in Harvard University in 1977 and then became a budget examiner in the Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget in Washington, D.C. At OMB he began his civil service career in the Labor Branch; from 1982 to just before he died, he worked in the Education Branch where he had primary responsibility for post-secondary student aid programs.
In 1968, Fred received one of the highest honors awarded to federal civilian or military employees, the Arthur S. Flemming Award, given to only 10 career federal employees annually for outstanding and meritorious achievements. He also received the 1980 Professional Achievement Award and the 1990 Outstanding Service Award from the Office of Management and Budget.
Fred Fischer was a rare soul. He took life seriously. He attacked life’s challenges with an intellectual and moral rigor. Because of his seriousness, and rigor, he made each of us more honest when we participated with him.
For all his seriousness, Fred also took life with an appropriate grain of salt. He saw its absurd moments and was willing to make fun of them—even at his own expense. That combination of playfulness and intensity was an integral part of our Amherst experience, and perhaps the experience of our generation in the late ’60sand ’70s. At our best, we insisted that life measure up to high standards, and that it be full of fun. Fred managed to preserve that combination in his later years, without ever becoming self-indulgent or lazy.
Many of us first knew Fred as a busboy in Valentine, or as a dazzling student who spoke his mind better than we might imagine possible. He was the brilliant guy with the headband about his long red hair, t-shirt and red suspenders. He looked like a wrestler, which he had been in high school, but it took only seconds of conversation to be engaged by him in mind grapple. He loved hard, acid rock, Woodstock, comic books, flamingos, manifestations and symbols of our popular and frequently mindless culture, and he pursued his play every bit as hard as he worked. He was a conversationalist of the first order. Because of all the characteristics that come to mind when you try to summarize a life as intense and a curiosity as broad as Fred’s, there is as part of every recollection the fact that he loved and lived by ideas. Former mayor Larry Cohen called him a genius; the man who hired him for his first job at OMB recalled at the memorial service in Washington that he was a brilliant budget examiner (attested to in part by the several hundred government employees and other friends who attended the service). But to those of us who were privileged to know him well, he was never haughty or unapproachable. He was occasionally wrong and would admit it (but only if you had the goods on him), and the ideas that he read and thought about were always at the service of his humanity.
You are spared the humorous anecdotes. Anyone who knew Fred will have their own, those who did not should learn from our grief that we now miss a fascinating, colorful, (that word again) “brilliant” spirit whose constant admonition was to “keep the faith” and who showed by doing so himself how to come of age in the 1970s without coming apart. His public and private life were directed to making a positive difference to our culture and humanity, always through thoughtful analysis, rigorous thinking and adherence to moral principles.
Fred is survived by his mother, Jeanne, and his companion of the past several years, Ashley Files. Ashley lived through his dying with him, and her love in the face of Fred’s helplessness is instruction to us all.
John H. Peterson ’71
James J. Brudney ’71