Gladys Fay Spring

Gladys F. Spring, age 96, died with family by her side early Saturday morning on September 17, 2022 at the caring and loving community of Greenbriar at the Altamont in Birmingham, Alabama. She was born on a farm in Douglasville, Pennsylvania in 1926 to Charles and Ada (Durr) Wentzel and was the youngest of ten children. She was a wife and mother of two children: her son Vincent (Barbara) Campbell and her daughter Linda (James-deceased) Delahay. Gladys was also a loving grandmother to Sarah R. Campbell, William M. Delahay and Matthew V. Delahay and a beloved aunt to Carol (Richard) Mauermann. Gladys was preceded in death by her parents and her nine siblings. She gave her family a love of nature, cooking and Braves baseball; she was their most devoted fan. Gladys will be remembered for her funny and heartwarming stories of growing up the youngest of ten kids in Pennsylvania Dutch country during the Depression. Along with these tales, her stories about the restaurant industry she loved and the many famous people she waited on have become family lore. Gladys worked as a trained waitress for much of her life and served in some of the finest restaurants in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Alabama, and she loved what she did so much that her only recurrent dream concerned her not being able to wait on all her customers on time. There will be no service in Birmingham, but her ashes will be scattered in the Pennsylvania countryside where she will become a part of the area she loved so much. Gladys’s family would like to extend its gratitude to all the staff of Greenbriar at the Altamont’s Skilled Nursing Center in Birmingham for the wonderful care you gave to Mom. We will miss the stories of her feistiness and of your chasing her wheelchair as she zipped down the hallways. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made in Gladys’s name to the Exceptional Foundation of Birmingham.