Herb was born in 1915 in Bruderheim, Canada, the son of German wheat farmers.  After years of drought and a devastating prairie fire, the family immigrated to Portland, Oregon. There, Herb helped his mother garden, picked berries in the neighboring fields, and worked in his father’s cabinet shop to help feed the family during the depression. He attended Benson Technical High School, where the value of hard work, hands on experiences, and follow through was emphasized. He set his sights on going to college.

     The first of his extended family to attend college, Herb left for Oregon State in 1932 carrying a cardboard suitcase and a handful of change his mother had saved in a sugar-bowl. He wanted to be a surgeon but knew that medical school was out of reach. The love of the land led him to decide to major in forestry.  Summers found him in the remote mountains of the Cascades as a fire lookout. One year in a tower in the McKinzie River country, another in Starwano Camp cabin where he was packed in by a mule string.

     After graduating from Oregon State, he sought a master’s degree in forestry at Syracuse University in New York. There he came to the attention of young Truman Doud (Teddy) Collins. The Collins Pine Company owned large tracks of land in Pennsylvania, southern Oregon, and northern California.  He began working for the Collins family surveying land and cruising timber.  With his master’s degree and a new wife in hand, Herb moved to Quincy, California in 1940 to work for Collins Pine.

     In 1946 Collins Pine Company decided to build a lumber mill in Medford, Oregon. They put together a team consisting of a forest manager, a personnel manager, and a general manager.  Herb was to be the personnel manager.  He moved his family from Quincy to Medford in 1947. Herb worked tirelessly from before dawn to after dark building Elk Lumber Company.

     In the winter of 1959, due to a management shakeup at the mill, Herb was forced out. He decided to make a career change.       With connections from his Oregon State days, he knew the dean of the School of Forestry at UC Berkeley, Dean Vaux, and a distinguished professor Dr. Rudy Grah both of whom recommended Herb for an open instructor position at Berkeley’s School of Forestry.  Herb began teaching logging engineering, sylviculture, and forest management in the spring of 1960. He was assigned to manage all of UC’s forests:  Blodgett Experimental Forest (now called Blodgett Research Station), Whittaker Forest, and other smaller parcels. He was also in charge of the forestry summer camp at Bucks Lake out of Quincy.

     Herb loved to take interested students on an industry field trip each spring. Because of his industry experience and connections with those in the forest industry, this often resulted in graduating students making contacts that would become their future careers. 

     Blodgett blossomed under Herb’s management. The dark, crowded forest was thinned, and birds returned. The bubbling spring supplied water for the main house, and soon electricity, a well, and a phone line were added. He hired students to build three A-frame houses, the staff house, a maintenance shop, and student cabins.  Graduate students and their families could stay for extended periods of time to design and work on their doctorial theses from entomology to geography, as well as the effects of fire on the forest, photosynthesis, harvesting practices, and forest management. At the end of a workday, Herb would often sit on a stump around the campfire along with students, guests, and family.  He would tamp down the tobacco in his pipe, strike a match with his thumb nail to light it and tell a story from his fire lookout days, a bear story, or share a ghost tale from the woods.  He was beloved by his students.

     Herb felt that the woods were a holy place. He would say, ‘…come gently, not as a master, but as a guest.’

     Herb died at lunchtime of a heart attack. April 1976. He had been out in the forest that morning planting trees.  He knew that he wouldn’t be around in 60 years to see those trees mature, but he also knew that planting trees, managing a healthy forest, was what it was all abt.