Love on Call

by Sherril Steele-Carlin

Sallie Springmeyer has a heart as big as Nevada. A tiny woman, slight of build, and slim as a lodgepole pine, her memory is a little fuzzy. After all, she turns 98 this month. But her eyes are still bright and alert, her lined face gentle and honest.

Springmeyer has spent nearly all those 98 years helping others, first in her native New York, and then for more than 70 years in Nevada. She’s worked with mental patients, prisoners, children, and senior citizens. She’s helped them write living wills, learn to read, and go to church on Sundays; she’s read the newspaper to mental patients, taught occupational therapy to senior citizens, read to children, and fed sick infants. Wherever she was needed, she went. Now, Sallie Springmeyer has been given something back for her heartfelt efforts.

This past May, Springmeyer was honored by the University of Nevada Board of Regents as one of five Distinguished Nevadans for her 70 years of volunteer work in Nevada. Sitting on the sofa in her Mud Lake home, outside Gardnerville, Nev. (pop. 3,357), she shakes her head at the notion.

“I don’t think I deserve it,” she muses, “lots of people have done it.”

That’s the woman in a nutshell. She doesn’t think she’s anything special or what she’s done is anything unusual. The regents don’t agree. Their Distinguished Nevadan award is the most prestigious accolade conferred by the board and is “bestowed on individuals who have made significant achievements that have contributed to the cultural, scientific, or social advancement of Nevada.”

Springmeyer came to Nevada in 1931, met a lawyer named George Springmeyer, and married him. He urged her to get her law degree and join him in his law firm. Sallie then attended Stanford and the University of Southern California Law School and after obtaining her degree became one of the first women lawyers to practice in Nevada. But something seemed constantly to pull her attention away from a potential full-time legal career—volunteering around northern Nevada. It has always been a part of Springmeyer’s life.

“I went (volunteered) most every day, but not on Saturday. Some Sundays I’d take people to church who were in wheelchairs,” she remembers.

Before she came to Nevada, she attended Vassar College and majored in social services. Her father urged all his children to adopt a charity when they were young. Sallie doesn’t remember what her special charity was, but she never stopped sharing her life with others, until just a couple of years ago, when her health forced her to slow down a little. She misses the work, saying, “I don’t have much of anything to do now.”

Sallie and George had one daughter, Sally Springmeyer Zanjani. George died in 1966, and Sallie moved to the Mud Lake ranch full time from their home in Reno. Zanjani, who writes about Nevada and the West, says her mother volunteered “for as long as I can remember.” The daughter displays understandable pride in her mother’s accomplishments and accepted the regents award for her mother. “She used her law degree to further her goals in public service,” Zanjani says.

Today, Sallie lives on the ranch in Mud Lake with longtime family friend Bev Trotner, enjoying the sweeping views of the Carson Range from her porch. She reads a lot (“biographies are my favorite”), works in the garden, and feeds a variety of birds living around the lake. There is also quality time spent with her daughter and three grandchildren, as well as visiting with her many friends.

“I’ve enjoyed my life,” Springmeyer says, “and enjoyed the many people I’ve known, my many friends. They are what made my life.”

Sherril Steele-Carlin is a freelance writer from Reno, Nev.

first appeared: 8/12/2001