My first big dilemma in writing about the Author of A.M.E. Today was whether to write it as if it was me writing about myself or...as an outside observer.

I have never been too comfortable either writing about myself, or talking about myself in the third person. Sports figures seem to do it easily. Can still hear Bo Jackson resounding in my ears as he talked about Bo doing this or Bo doing that.

I will not put you through a John did this or John did that. Instead just a short, and hopefully direct, course between where I started and where I am today.

In 1949, September of that year on the Ides of the month, Doris and Harrison Fisher gave birth to a bouncing baby boy.

I was the first of two boys born to them. The second, my brother Jeffrey, arrived six years later.

I was born in Philadelphia, but only because there were no hospitals in Bristol Borough, Pennsylvania, the town where my father lived all his life. And his father before him and several generations of the Fishers and their ancestors, the Conns, going back to the early 1800s.

Say what you may about my family, but when we sink our roots we really sink our roots! My great, great, great grandfather, Charles Conn fought in the Civil War with the 8th United States Colored Infantry and was shot at the Battle of Oulestee in Florida. Despite being wounded, he managed to come back home to continue the family line. Thank You grandpop Charles. I will have a Civil War link here shortly.

Me? It was a normal childhood in Bristol, a town where everybody knew your name, color was a second thought....what part of town you lived in was the first thought...and things were pretty peaceful as we all grow up in a Tom Sawyer (minus the slaves) type of existence along the Delaware River.

After graduation I went to Tarkio College in Tarkio Missouri. Yes, Tarkio does stand for something it means Walnut in an American Indian dialect, although I am not quite sure what dialect. I went to Dickinson College in Carlisle for a year before finding Tarkio, but that is a story left better untold and blamed on the political climate of the 1960s.

From Tarkio, where I graduated in 1971 with a major in English Literature, I returned home and began a 27 year run with the Bucks County Courier Times newspaper in Levittown.

At the Courier Times, I spent the vast majority of my career as the Entertainment Editor covering virtually every rock concert and live stage show that passed through the Philadelphia area between 1972 and 1994.

I got married in 1975 to the former Jan Hart. First we raised her two children from a former marriage, Michael and Barbara, and then we proceeded to have Dorian, our pride and joy, who despite being a teenager can still be described as a pride and joy!

Somewhere along the line the computer bug bit and what was a hobby turned into a job when I became multi-media guru for the paper in 1994, developing first a bulletin board system for the paper and then a web site, the online edition of the paper, which I still edit and maintain.

But something even more important happened along the way, as the 1980s came to a conclusion, my ministry came to a beginning.

After teaching Sunday School and singing in all of the choirs at Bethel A.M.E. Church in Bristol Borough, the Lord called me to an even greater work for Him. To preach His gospel. I think I spent at least a year pretending I did not hear the call but it soon became clear, even to hard-headed me, this was one call that could not go unanswered.

I preached my trial sermon in December of 1989, was ordained an Itinerant Deacon in 1994 and was asked to supply Historic Ben Salem A.M.E. Church in Bensalem Township PA in July of 1997.  In May of 1998, I received my first full year appointment as pastor of Bne Salem A.M.E. Church, where the congregation has grown from zero, which first arrived, to approximately 35 at this writing.

During my life, because of my work, I have been able to meet stars of all magnitudes, I got to go to events and see presentations that most only dream of, but in retrospect, that all seems so unimportant in comparison to the fact that God called me to work for Him.

And it is in God's service that I now devote the skills, He once allowed me to use in the secular world, to His greater glory.

And John knows this to be true...whoops said I would not talk about my self in the third person.