John Regis Fisher was born on October 13, 1908, in Salem, Ohio, and received his elementary education at St. Paul School in Salem. His secondary education was taken at Duquesne University High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and at Aquinas College High School in Columbus, Ohio. Following two years of study at Providence College, Providence, Rhode Island, be entered the novitiate at St. Rose Priory in Springfield, Kentucky, in 1929 and made his first profession there on August 16, 1940, taking the name of Brother Cyril Mary. Philosophical studies were completed at the Dominican House of Studies in River Forest, Illinois, and theological studies both at St. Joseph Priory in Somerset, Ohio, and at the House of Studies in Washington, D.C. He was ordained a priest at Saint Dominic's Church in Washington on June 10, 1936.

After ordination, Father Fisher began a program of studies in chemistry at the Catholic University of America in preparation for doctoral work at Yale University and eventual assignment to the faculty at Providence College. This study plan was interrupted in the fall of 1937 when he received a temporary assignment to teach mathematics at Fenwick High School in Oak Park, Illinois, General science courses were soon added to his schedule; later chemistry became his specialty. At the same time, he completed graduate studies at Loyola University in Chicago for a master's degree in mathematics in 1943 and then continued with additional research in mathematics until he had finished all the requirements for a doctorate except the residency requirement which he was never able to gain permission to fulfill,

Father Fisher's "temporary" assignment ended when serious heart trouble forced him to leave the classroom and laboratory at the end of the 1980-1981 academic year. During his long teaching career, he also served his local community as subprior three times and his province by volunteering each summer to replace the brethren working in parishes and hospital chaplaincies. Three booklets on laboratory technique and basic laboratory mathematics are also on his list of accomplishments.

During the fall of 1981, Father Fisher's cardiac condition grew worse. Hospitalization first at West Suburban Hospital in Oak Park and then at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago led to surgery to restore his damaged heart valves. The post- surgical prognosis seemed promising, and he was able to return to community life at St. Dominic-St. Thomas Priory. However, early in the evening of January 6, 1982, he was found in his room dead of apparent heart failure. Following funeral services at the Priory, he was buried in the Dominican plot in All Saints Cemetery, Des Plaines, Illinois, on January 9.

In early 1978, Oak Leaves, Oak Park's community newspaper, published an interview with Father Fisher to mark his forty years of teaching at Fenwick. When asked about why he stayed so long at Fenwick, Father Fisher replied, "What happened is that I was assigned to a basement classroom and got lost down there, and I think they forgot about me. I tried to escape three times, but to tell the truth, I'm glad I stayed on." So, too, were generations of

Fenwick students who profited from the intellectual demands of what he often described simply as "kitchen kemistry."