Henry Springer: bound to bridges and birds.

AuthorAnjum, Shehla
PositionICONIC ALASKANS - In memoriam

It was the books with the Wild West adventures of Apache chief Winnetou that inspired Heinrich "Henry" Springer as a schoolboy in Germany. They became a prelude to his life in Alaska, his home since 1960. German writer Karl May, who wrote those books and never set foot in the American West, created Winnetou, his German sidekick Old Shatterhand, and the places where they roamed.

May only made it to the United States a few years before he died. Springer made it twice. First as a high school exchange student in Pennsylvania. Then returning, at age twenty-three in 1959, as an immigrant, and moving to the wilds of Alaska a few months later. He never left.

Springer is known as an engineer, scientist, artist, carver, hunter, birder, taxidermist, and a one-term legislator--to which he said "enough." His adventures took him around Alaska and, later, the world.

Alaska's engineering and construction industry knows him for his work on bridges and other projects; the state's science community knows him for his study of birds and his collection of six thousand specimens.

Springer excelled both in his engineering career and in his scientific studies and collections of birds and received accolades in both worlds. One that gladdens him was the 2008 dedication of Henry Springer Ornithology Laboratory at the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The plaque for the laboratory acknowledges how Springer's "generous contributions of bird specimens, knowledge, and expertise ... greatly advanced the field of ornithology in Alaska."

Imagining America

Springer, now seventy-seven, grew up in Donauworth, a small manufacturing town in southern Germany, where factories churned out war equipment for Hitler's army. His father, a professional soldier, served in that army and spent most of the war on the Russian front, visiting his family only twice during the six years of World War II.

Life was tough during the war and for years afterward. With few toys and other distractions, children either read or played outdoors. "We became fascinated with nature and wildlife. All of us had birds as pets. We went looking for frogs and collected beetles and butterflies," Springer says.

That fascination with the outdoors and the books of Karl May ingrained a love of science in Springer and a desire to see the country that epitomized wilderness to him. "I had an interest in biology since I was a child and I wanted to see America. I imagined America as a huge wilderness where bears and wolves roamed."

Springer got his chance in 1953. A few months after his high school graduation he set sail to spend a year in Pennsylvania under the Fulbright High School Exchange Program for German youths. Springer enrolled as a senior in high school and lived with a farm family near a small town.

"I liked Pennsylvania. The people were free and had few social barriers between them. I decided that after college I would move to the United States," he says. The Fulbright program required that he return home after a year. Springer went back, studied civil engineering at Munich State College, and received his degree in 1959.

A methodical person, Springer researches his options and the possible outcomes carefully. He found out that civil engineers were in demand in the United States...

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