Longtime library director Harry Dutcher, who was responsible for Saratoga Springs Public Library on Henry Street, dies at 66

That was the sentiment Saratoga Springs Library Board of Directors President Kenneth Bollerud remembers about Harry Dutcher, the library’s former director and the man Bollerud said is largely responsible for the library now on Henry Street.

Dutcher died at the age of 66 Thursday, Jan. 10, in Saratoga Hospital.

“We were very lucky as a community to have had him,” Bollerud said Saturday. “He would not accept second best.”

Bollerud was actually on the board of directors in 1982, when Dutcher was hired as library director.

“He had a wonderful feeling the day he talked to the board of directors,” his widow, Monica Dutcher said Saturday. “We loved the community the first time we drove in.”

She said when she and Harry went out in the city, people would spontaneously thank him for his service to the community over his quarter-century as director of the Saratoga Springs Public Library.

When he started at the library three decades ago, it was located at the corner of Spring Street and Broadway. Dutcher gathered support for an expansion, and according to Bollerud, he did not compromise on what the library needed.

“He was very diplomatic. He brought people in,” he said. “He saw what was possible out there … and we reaped the benefit of it.”

According to librarians at Saratoga Springs Public Library, Friday was a somber day.

“He was extremely professional, but he was also a kind, nice man and a good friend,” said Miriam Meier, a retired director of the Southern Adirondack Library System who knew Dutcher for more than 20 years. She highlighted his foresight in his work.

Meier said Dutcher was on the cutting-edge of library science when she was director in the late ’80s and was at the forefront of Southern Adirondack Library System’s efforts to shift card cataloguing to electronic searches.

When she went to school for library science, Meier said she could have never imagined the number of people sitting at their computers, working, as they were in the library Saturday.

“It’s not just a place where you come to get a book and go home, and he saw that as a possibility,” Meier said.