Marion E. Fisher (1918-2013), of Northampton, Massachusetts, served as a dietitian with the civil service and then in the army from 1942 to 1945. After World War II she returned to civil service work with the Veterans Administration and the Department of the Navy until her retirement in 1974. Marion Elizabeth Fisher was born on 7 May 1918 and raised in Northampton, Massachusetts, the daughter of a roofing contractor and homemaker. She graduated from Northampton High School in 1935 and from Mary A. Burnham School for Girls in 1936. Fisher entered the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro) in the fall of 1936 and graduated with a degree in home economics in 1940. From the fall of 1940 to the spring of 1941 she did an internship in hospital dietetics at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, then worked for a year at a private hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts. Fisher became a civil service dietitian at Fort Bragg in North Carolina in the spring of 1942. She was commissioned in the army the following year and sent to Camp Shelby in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for overseas training with the 262nd Station Hospital. Fisher spent some time in Oran and Sidi Bel Abbes, Algeria, then Naples, Italy, before being transferred to nearby Aversa, Italy, in the fall of 1943. She remained at the military hospital there for approximately eighteen months, then served for a short time with the 17th General Hospital in Naples. Fisher returned from Italy in the fall of 1945 and was discharged from the army. Fisher returned to civil service work after the war, serving as a dietitian for Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals in Thomasville, Georgia; Memphis, Tennessee; Columbia, South Carolina; Wilmington, Delaware; and Durham, North Carolina. She then left the VA and went to Washington, D.C., to work with for the navy in the Office of Food Service Systems Command, where she set up training guidelines for food service billets and produced training films for navy cooks. Fisher retired from the navy in 1974 She died in Virginia on 3 May 2013.
