Neighbors Mary and Lewis Fisher
Campfire Tales with Mary and Lewis Fisher
By Elizabeth Bobbitt | Photography by David Teran
Mary and Lewis Fisher have spent much of their lives telling the stories of San Antonio and Texas. While they are both decorated authors and historians in their own right, it is their shared drive for uncovering the secrets of the city’s past that continues to inspire their work as a team.
“I am always fascinated by the myths of San Antonio’s past,” Lewis says. “Our city typically told its stories through the spoken word. People told each other campfire tales, stories that were recorded by early reporters who came to visit San Antonio when it was still considered the ‘Wild West.’ In my books, I have gone back to dig up written records of these founding myths, and they are often quite different from the stories that have been handed down to us. There is always something new to discover.”
In the past 30 years Lewis has written 14 books on San Antonio, several of them published by Maverick Publishing Company, which he established in 1996 – there was no regional press in San Antonio – and later by Trinity University Press, which purchased his company in 2014. His books span topics as diverse as Brackenridge Park, the San Antonio River, the Chili Queens of the city’s Spanish plazas, and the enduring legacy of the Maverick Family and its name, synonymous with the fierce independence of the Texan spirit. Mary is herself a descendant of Texas pioneer Samuel Maverick, who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. She is named after Samuel Maverick’s wife, the “first” Mary Maverick, who chronicled her life on the Texas frontier in her diaries. In 1889, Mary Maverick published an account of the fall of the Alamo. The Fishers’ Texas roots and literary legacy runs deep.
Mary has written widely as a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News and for the North San Antonio Times, founded by Mary and Lewis in 1971. She has penned a history of Sunshine Cottage School for Deaf Children, a children’s book based on the life of Tejano singer Rosita Fernandez, and a centennial retrospective of the Alamo Heights Independent School District.
“I was fortunate to have known Bishop Everett Jones and his friend Clifton George, who shared their early memories of Alamo Heights. They rode their horses to school in the 1910s – the area was very rural in those days. I also relied on school board minutes and miscellaneous materials. I had to piece each superintendent’s tenure together like a checkerboard, but, during any research project, there were always fascinating little tidbits that keep you going. I see it with Lewis’s work all the time,” Mary says.
Lewis’s next book, Texas Trails and Glass Pyramids: Creating the San Antonio Botanical Garden, will be published this October. He is currently at work on a second book for Texas Tech University Press, entitled Icon of the Skyline: San Antonio’s Tower Life Building, to be published in the summer of 2027.
The Fishers in ’09
Mary and Lewis have lived since 1973 in the same house in Terrell Hills, where they raised their two sons, William and Maverick. Today, visitors are welcomed by a xeriscape front yard adorned with native plants and a screened front porch designed in 2010 by architect John Grable, where their chihuahua mix, Sita, guards the front door. The house was custom-built by lumberman Vaughan Meyer in 1951.
“I grew up on Sunshine Ranch, a Maverick family compound on Babcock road. When I was in sixth grade, we moved across town to Terrell Hills. It was a huge adjustment for me because I was so used to running around barefoot out on the ranch. I think I needed that polish,” Mary laughs.
Lewis, originally from Rochester, New York, came to San Antonio for officer training at Lackland Air Force Base. It was during his training that he first met Mary through a family friend, Mary’s grandmother Maverick. “She found out that I had been an English major in college, and said, ‘Oh! I have a granddaughter who’s an English major at the University of Texas right now.’ We met in her grandmother’s living room,” Lewis says. “Soon after that he was stationed in Izmir, Turkey, followed by Wiesbaden, Germany.”
“Lewis wrote his first book while he was stationed in Izmir,” Mary says. “It was a guidebook called Introducing Izmir. He wrote it during his off time.”
It was not until Mary, who was teaching English at Jefferson High School, took a trip to Europe with a friend that Mary and Lewis reconnected.
“It was Cupid, I guess,” says Mary. “I decided to stay in Germany, and I got a job at the Air Force Base Exchange. He was about to leave the Air Force, and soon after we were married in San Antonio.”
“We spent our first year in New York while I earned my master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University,” says Lewis. “The idea was that I would give her a year in her home state after that, but marriage is about compromise, so we compromised and I stayed in Texas,” he laughs.
After moving to San Antonio, Lewis worked as a reporter for the San Antonio Express News for two years, before Mary and Lewis founded the North San Antonio Times.
“At the time, there was no subscription-based, suburban weekly in San Antonio, so we decided to start one,” Lewis says.
The North San Antonio Times grew into a group of suburban newspapers, which Lewis published for 21 years.
“Alamo Heights was an ideal place to start a suburban newspaper because it has always been a close-knit community. Like the older suburbs in the Northeast of the country, 78209 has been an established community for over a century, where new generations of families continue to settle,” Lewis says.
Looking Forward with the Fishers
Dubbed a Texas Preservation Hero by the San Antonio Conservation Society in 2014 and a member of the board of the Texas State Historical Association, Lewis has a keen eye for local sites at risk of being lost. For the Fishers, Brackenridge Park is one of San Antonio’s unique amenities. Lewis currently serves on the advisory board of the Brackenridge Park Conservancy, while Mary has also served on its board. They will be honored October 7th at the Brackenridge Park Conservancy’s annual gala for their dedication to preserving the park’s landmarks and recording its storied past.
“Growing up, Brackenridge Park was our conduit to culture,” Mary recalls. “Once a month, my family and I would go down to the park. It was always my happy place. I took pottery with Harding Black at the Witte Museum, we would listen to the organ grinder at the Zoo, and we would take a ride on the miniature train. I even remember the founder of the Witte, Mrs. Ellen Quillin, greeting us at the door.”
Looking ahead to preservation challenges in 78209 as its neighborhoods grow older, Lewis observes that it is easy to demolish landmark homes in Alamo Heights and Terrell Hills.
“Neighborhoods within the City of San Antonio have well-defined, strict, historical preservation ordinances to protect their landmarks. There are no such ordinances in our separately incorporated suburbs, yet we have the Argyle Hotel, built in 1854, and numerous homes of architectural significance of later eras that are worthy of protection,” Lewis says.
The work of Mary and Lewis Fisher has contributed immeasurably to the written record of San Antonio and its surrounding communities. Visiting with them in the Fishers’ living room, it is clear they share the same enthusiasm for storytelling as those early Texas pioneers did with the campfire tales that would become defining myths of San Antonio’s history.
