Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 17, 1993 TAG: 9305150188
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LYNCHBURG LENGTH: Long
Below, the crowd of air-show spectators would go wild with panic. He'd hear the din as he plummeted a few hundred feet above the earth.
At the last possible moment, he'd pull the rip cords on a second, hidden parachute. Then he'd float gently to the ground - and listen as the crowd puffed out an almost simultaneous sigh of relief.
Chauncey Spencer is full of surprises.
You can't pigeonhole him. And please - whatever you do - don't try to label him.
Over the years, people have tried to tell him he was a Colored man, a Negro, a black man and, these days, an African American.
He believes labeling people is divisive. First and foremost, "I'm an American." Besides, his ancestors include a melange of African, Irish, and Seminole peoples.
During the 1950s military officials - who wanted him to "go slow" on his push to integrate an Air Force base - tried to brand him a liar, pervert and Communist. He spent his family's savings fighting the charges - and proved them wrong.
Another time, a black-owned newspaper in Ohio tried to label him as a corrupt Uncle Tom. The paper said he was abusing the authority of his civilian position at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base by discriminating against members of his own race. He sued for libel - and won $3,500.
"I don't fool with newspaper people," Chauncey Spencer said recently with a laugh, in the midst of an interview that lasted nearly two hours. "They're dangerous."
Chauncey Spencer is a hard man to pin down. Even the title of his autobiography (published in 1975) includes a question mark: "Who is Chauncey Spencer?"
He is, and has been, many things:
Son of Anne Spencer, the famed Lynchburg poet and one-woman civil rights movement. A teen-age bellhop who ran bootleg whiskey and procured prostitutes for corrupt cops. A stunt pilot and sky-diver.
A civil rights pioneer who helped integrate the Army Air Corps. A California police chief. An assistant city manager in Michigan.
Political gadfly and two-time candidate for Lynchburg City Council. Father of eight. Member of the Virginia Aviation Hall of Fame.
"Hell," he says, summing up, "I guess I'm a human curiosity."
Chauncey Spencer is 86. He looks 66. Maybe younger.
His hair is gray, with a dark strip down the middle. His mustache is meticulously trimmed.
He's now retired after a lifetime of travels and tussles. He lives with his wife, Anne (that's right: same name as his famous mom), and his son Ed in a house on Pierce Street in Lynchburg. Across the way is the Anne Spencer House, the family homeplace that is now a Virginia Historical Landmark.
Listening to Chauncey Spencer reach back across the 20th century and tell his life story is a bit like watching a maestro conduct a symphony. His hands swish the air in fluid movements, indicating the highs and lows of his adventures and moving faster as each tale reaches a climax.
The phone rings. Spencer interrupts the interview to take a call from a local politician. He talks for a few minutes, then ends the conversation by saying, "Don't tear your pants on City Council. All right, baby. Take care of yourself."
Like many folks who have reached Spencer's impressive number of years, he has a tendency to wander off the point. But never too far. He lets you know he remembers the original question - he'll get back to it momentarily. But first, he has stories to tell.
Lynchburg and beyond
1917: A clear, chilly April day. Chauncey, 11, heard his mother call him: "Woogie, come here." He ran to her, red clay sticking to his shoes. Then: "Look up."
He did. In the sky, he saw a sight: An airplane slicing through the clouds. The first one he'd ever seen.
The next day, he built his own aircraft out of some old sheets, a wooden barrel and a toy wagon. He pulled it around the hills of Lynchburg and dreamed of flying away.
Chauncey Edward Spencer was born Nov. 5, 1906.
Chauncey's mother, Anne Spencer, was, by all accounts, an odd woman. By the time Chauncey was a young man, the poems she wrote on the backs of old envelopes and in the margins of newspapers had made her one of the leading writers of the Harlem literary renaissance. She was also a political activist, forever writing letters to the local newspaper, hectoring community leaders white and black.
To this day, Chauncey Spencer often starts sentences like this: "Mother used to say . . . "
But he says his real role model was his father. His father first ran a corner store, then took over the city's parcel post route.
"He was what we called a quiet man," Spencer remembers. "When he said something, it was worth listening. He had good, sound footage. He loved his family. He provided for his family. Even his son - who was a nuisance."
The family home on Pierce Street served as a way station on the intellectual underground railroad between blacks in the North and South during the first half of the century.
Black luminaries who slept over from time to time included scientist George Washington Carver, poet Langston Hughes, historian W.E.B. DuBois and civil rights lawyer and eventual Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Perhaps it was contact with such shining lights that made the restlessness in the boy. Or perhaps it was the Jim Crow system of racism that underpinned life in Lynchburg.
Chauncey got a whiff of the town's seamy side when he took a job, at age 14, as a drug-store delivery boy. He delivered sodas, medicine and prescription liquor to the houses of prostitution in the red-light district a few blocks from his home. The madams and the painted ladies took a liking to him and invited him in to sit and talk. To the teen-ager, they seemed beautiful.
Later, he worked as a bellhop at the Hotel Carroll.
During his first week, he answered a call to deliver ice to a room. The man inside asked him to bring some liquor. When Spencer returned, the man pulled a badge: He was a federal agent.
He made Spencer give his name and bellhop number - 4 - and then called downstairs to make sure he was telling the truth.
Then he said he'd forget the liquor rap if Spencer would do him another favor - Get him a girl. Spencer arranged for a prostitute to come over.
A half hour later, the cop summoned Spencer back to the room. The woman was in bed, the covers up to her neck. The agent was walking around, his bathrobe flapping open.
"Hey, No. 4," he told Spencer. "You did a good job. You know, every now and then I have to pitch one, and whenever I come here I want to you to get my liquor for me - and when I need a girl like Georgia over here, I want you to get her, too."
He held out $15. Spencer grabbed it and stuffed it in his pocket.
As a young man, Chauncey went through a series of odd jobs, drove a truck and managed a movie theater. When his marriage to his high school sweetheart broke up, he decided to escape Lynchburg. He headed for Chicago and enrolled in flying school.
In Lynchburg, he had been told blacks could not learn to fly. In Chicago, he washed dishes in diners around The Loop to scrape together the $25 an hour it cost to fly.
Soon, he was bailing out of airplanes in air shows.
At one show, he remembers, he was asked to test a new triangular parachute. He was so busy showboating for the crowd that he waited too late to pull the rip cord. When he finally did, a few hundred feet from the ground, his head snapped back violently.
By that night, he couldn't move his arms or legs. He was paralyzed for 10 days.
`The guts to fly'
May 1939: Chauncey Spencer and his best friend, Dale White, climbed into the open-air cockpits of a two-winged Lincoln-Paige plane. The rented plane had no instruments other than oil-pressure and air-speed gauges.
Its top speed was no more than 110 miles per hour. "If you ran into a headwind," Spencer remembers, "you could almost feel yourself go backward."
The pair were leaving on a goodwill tour of 10 cities to publicize the skill of black pilots.
After just four hours, the engine threw a crankshaft. They made a jostled emergency landing in a cornfield in Sherwood, Ohio.
Most of the townspeople came out to the cornfield to see the plane and the pilots. Spencer thought they probably hadn't seen more than one or two blacks in their lives. But they welcomed the young aviators, paying for their meals and lodging until the plane could be repaired.
The flyers finally made their way to Washington, D.C. They began to lobby members of Congress to allow black aviators into the Army Air Corps, the predecessor of the Air Force.
They invited a senator from Missouri, Harry S. Truman, out to the airport for a flight in their plane.
After Truman got a look at the contraption, he wasn't about to go up in it. But he did tell the pair: "If you've got the guts to fly that plane from Chicago, I can fight to get you into the Air Corps."
That promise led to a series of bills that culminated, in 1942, in a law allowing blacks to join the Army Air Corps.
Spencer had helped break the color line. But he never flew in a warplane. He was in his 30s, too old to fly under Army regulations.
Not long after he arrived back in Chicago, he met a young woman named Anne Howard. One day, standing in six inches of snow at 47th Street and South Parkway in Chicago, he asked her to marry him.
He was a half hour late to their wedding. The marriage has lasted 53 years.
Fighting for his reputation
Spencer worked at several civilian jobs for the military, moving up from aircraft instrument repairman to employee relations officer at an air field in Ohio.
His job: smooth the transition toward integration in non-military positions at the air base.
He found himself caught in the middle. He was lambasted both by whites who thought he was moving too quickly and by blacks who thought he was moving too slowly.
He says that his absolute insistence on no preferences for either race angered some blacks who expected special treatment from him because he, too, was black.
He won a libel suit against a black newspaper that had been critical of him.
His biggest fight for his reputation came in the 1953. He was waiting for a promotion to come through when he was informed he was being investigated as a security risk.
It was the McCarthy era. Loyalty witchhunts were ruining the careers of hundreds of civilians and soldiers. Government investigators tried to tar Spencer as a Communist and - based on three weeks he'd worked in a New York theater as a female impersonator - a sexual pervert.
He was suspended without pay. He applied for a janitor's job, but was told to come back "when this thing is cleared up."
At his hearing, an officer who supported Spencer testified that investigators seemed intent on getting him no matter what the evidence. The Secretary of the Air Force cleared Spencer of all charges and awarded him back pay.
But the taint of the allegations had derailed his career. He took a transfer to a lower-level government job in San Bernadino, Calif.
In 1959, tired and fed up, he retired from government work. He was 53 years old.
For a while he worked as a janitor, then as a security officer and substitute teacher at a high school.
His high-profile complaints about racism in city government gained him a reputation, among his opponents at least, as a troublemaker.
He campaigned for an upstart candidate for mayor, who beat the incumbent and promptly appointed Spencer the city's police commissioner.
Not every welcomed the new chief. One black-owned newspaper dredged up the security-risk charges from Ohio and printed a caricature of Spencer saying, "I'se gwanna be top dog in the Urban League and don ye forgot it."
He sued for libel - and once again won $3,500.
He stayed five years. From there, he was off to Highland Park, Mich. Five years as deputy city administrator. More clashes. More controversy.
By 1975, he was almost 70, and ready to retire.
A moving van had already taken the family belongings from Michigan back to San Bernadino.
Then he got a call from Lynchburg. Civic leaders wanted him to come home and help restore the family homeplace where his mother had lived until just before her death at age 93.
He planned to stay for a short while. But, with kids in college, "I got broke and I got stuck."
His retirement has not been placid.
There was tragedy: His son, Joel, an ex-Marine, became caught up in drugs and committed suicide in 1983. "I don't try to think of it too much," Spencer says. "He was a very fine young man."
There were more battles, too.
He ran for City Council twice, the second time with the help of a $7,000 contribution from televangelist Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. He lost both times, but was never shy about stating his opinions.
During his 1984 campaign, he said he was running against what he called the "Gang of Six." He described them as a group of black leaders who had failed to represent the interests of most black citizens.
He called M.W. Thornhill Jr., who would eventually become Lynchburg's first black mayor, a "ward boss."
Thornhill said recently that he's always refused to respond to Spencer. He said Spencer has criticized everyone who tries to do something for minority citizens.
Spencer says some black leaders, in Lynchburg and elsewhere, are more intent on stirring up trouble than bringing people together.
His arguments may sound a bit like the rhetoric used decades ago by people who opposed racial integration. But Spencer says he's always supported a society that is color-blind, period.
"Racism is on both sides of the fence," he says. As for his opponents, "I've told quite a few of them: I'd rather be called an Uncle Tom than a Tom Fool."
`I refuse to go'
Another day, another interview, another trip back into history. This time, Chauncey Spencer is in his pajamas, propped in his bed.
He's recovering from surgery. Spencer was first diagnosed with cancer in 1980. He's had three operations since then - and shows no signs of capitulating to the disease.
"I refuse to go," he says, proudly.
One friend told him: "You're just ornery and mean enough one day you'll step on a blade of grass and break your neck."
Perhaps, though, there's benefits, health-wise, to being ornery. Certainly, there's satisfaction of mind.
"You have to let people know what you're thinking," Chauncey Spencer says. He rises a little in his bed.
"You can't let them control your thoughts. It's not only un-American but unchristian to let other people control your thoughts. You don't have to be a leader. Just keep on being."
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB