Nininger, Harvey Harlow, 1887-....

Harvey H. Nininger was a renowned meteorite researcher and collector who as Curator of Meteorites from 1930 to 1946 made the Colorado Museum of Natural History, now the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, a center of scientific activity in that new field of study. Harvey Harlow Nininger was born in 1887 in a frontier shack near Conway Springs, a town on the prairie southwest of Wichita, Kansas. In 1914 he graduated from McPherson College in Kansas and married Nancy Adeline Delp. They had three children. After receiving a master's degree in Biology from Pomona College in California in 1917, he worked two years as an entomologist for the US Department of Agriculture. In 1920 he joined the faculty at McPherson College to teach biology. His world changed the evening of November 9, 1923, when he saw a meteor streak across the central Kansas sky. Nininger calculated where he thought the object should have landed and began to search for it. He was a county off but after a year he located his first meteorite. The hunt for meteorites would consume the rest of his long and productive life. In 1930 Nininger was hired as Curator of Meteorites at the Colorado Museum. He proved that meteorites could be found by systematic search after estimating the fall area, and he devised arrays of magnets to trail behind his field vehicle to gather iron meteorites. Nininger and his charges found hundreds of meteorites, and through sale or trade supplied specimens to many universities and institutions around the world. He built fine collections for the Museum and for himself. Nininger created the first classification system for meteorites and published numerous books and many articles reporting results of his pioneering research on meteorites. In 1937 he founded the American Meteorite Laboratory in Denver, an institution separate from the Museum. Denver and the Museum became primary sources for samples and information about meteorites. Nininger also played a key role in a serendipitous event in the Denver area in 1938. He recognized as dinosaur tracks the indentations on a rocky slope exposed by highway workers on west Alameda Avenue where it cuts the Dakota Hogback. The area was first investigated by the Museum and is now the famous Dinosaur Ridge, a National Natural Landmark. Nininger left Denver in 1946 to establish and operate the American Meteorite Museum in Arizona, first located by Meteor Crater and later in Sedona. He retired from the meteorite museum in 1960 but continued to investigate, consult, travel and lecture on meteorites. He also worked with his son-in-law who had taken over the American Meteorite Laboratory in 1960. In 1981 he moved back to Denver and died after a short illness in 1986, age 99.

Harvey Harlow Nininger was born to James B. and Mary A. (Bower) Nininger near Conway Springs, Kansas on January 17, 1887. The family moved to Missouri and later to Payne County, Oklahoma, where Nininger worked in the cotton fields and helped grub stumps and chop wood on his father's farm. He completed eighth grade at the age of nineteen and worked as the traveling secretary of the Orphans' Home of the Church of the Brethren in Oklahoma during the next year. During this time, he spent a week at McPherson College's Bible Institute. This week prompted him to further his education, and he studied at the Oklahoma State Normal School in Alva before gradating from McPherson with his B.A. in 1914.

Nininger married Addie N. Delp (1892-1978) on June 5, 1914 and the couple settled in California, where Nininger held a position as Professor of Biology at LaVerne College. While teaching he studied at Pomona College, completing his Master's degree in 1916. He went on to teach at the State Agricultural College of South Dakota at Brookings and at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas before accepting a faculty position at McPherson in 1920.

In 1923, Nininger saw a meteor so bright that he believed that some of it must have reached Earth. He abandoned biology to devote himself to meteorite studies and went on to amass the world's largest private collection of meteorites, which was sold to Arizona State University in 1960. Nininger also founded the Nininger Laboratory in Denver (1930), worked as Curator of Meteorites at the Denver Museum of Natural History (1930-1943), and founded and operated the American Meteorite Museum in Arizona (1946-1960). Nininger died on March 1, 1986 in Denver, Colorado.