Anton Otto Fischer, a German immigrant, was best known as an illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post. He also created a handful of propaganda posters for the U.S. government, all of which play on the tagline “a careless word.” This and other compositions of similar subjects caught the attention of the military, who swore him in as a lieutenant commander with the task of painting the heroic deeds of the merchant mariners and Coast Guardsmen. The archive of his work is currently housed in the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut.