THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, April 10, 1995 TAG: 9504080043
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: Long : 106 lines
CHARLES V. (``JACK'') Spencer of Virginia Beach raised close to 100 vessels as a salvage boat skipper.
And his death last week - at the age of 80 - will only enlarge the mythic quality that clung to him like a hooded yellow slicker in a storm.
Those who knew Jack Spencer can close their eyes and see him even now on the pitching foredeck of his barge, the Turtle, barking orders to its crew like a crippled Ahab. His strong hands gripping the rims of his wheelchair, he stared down howling northeasters with eyes slitted, salt spray whipping off the chin of his squared jaw.
Jack Spencer was surely the most colorful water rat and the damndest salvager to be seen in this port during our lifetime.
And he couldn't walk. He slept and rested in a hospital bed below deck with a metal bar supported by chains hanging from the overhead that could be grabbed during rough seas.
Rough he could handle. He was raised that way. Born in West Virginia, he was the son of a coal miner. He quit school when he was 13 to work in the mines himself. By 1940, he had been a storekeeper, a steel mill machine operator, a bookkeeper, a welder and welding school teacher.
He served as an infantryman with the Army during World War II and saw combat in the Philippines and on Okinawa before settling in Hampton Roads.
His first water-related job was a fishing pier business. He used an old barge - anchored off Ocean View - for the pier. When the barge was blown ashore during a storm, he salvaged it with bought and borrowed war surplus equipment.
He was hooked. Like the water rat in ``Wind in the Willows,'' he found nothing half so much fun as messing around in boats.
Salvaging was his specialty, whether it was an 18th century cannon fetched from near Lynnhaven Inlet or a 300-foot barge weighing 5,000 gross tons that had slammed into the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.
His most unusual salvage may have been of the USS Hartford. The Hartford was the flagship of Admiral David Farragut during the Battle of Mobile Bay in 1864. While aboard the vessel Farragut issued his famous order: ``Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!.''
The vessel sank off Norfolk in 1956, after being towed here for restoration. Spencer and his crew raised the Hartford by plugging the long gash in her side with canvas and pumping her dry. When the Hartford was taken to an abandoned wharf in Berkley, Spencer saluted her last voyage by raising a Confederate flag on his tugboat. (The warship was destroyed by fire, a year later.)
By 1959 Spencer's salvage equipment included the 65-foot tug Cynthia Anne, named for his daughter.
On a cold February day in 1960, Spencer had to repair the 42-ton tug's propellers at an Elizabeth River mooring. A derrick raised the tug's stern. Spencer slid under the propellers on a rubber raft and was working on them when the harness holding up the tug broke. It crashed onto his back.
``I was pushed right down into the river mud,'' he recalled. ``It was inky black, colder than nine hells, and I knew right away my back was broken.
His legs were paralyzed for the rest of his life. But he refused to surrender to his handicap.
He returned to his work with renewed vigor, directing his motley salvage crews from a wheelchair, always working with surplus or borrowed equipment but getting the job done.
His determination and free-wheeling style caught the eyes of officials at McGuire Veterans Hospital in Richmond, who asked him to work with paraplegics there.
And he did.
``Fifty percent of the people I deal with don't know I'm crippled,'' he told his audience of injured veterans. But he said he didn't want to be regarded as an example.
``I cuss a lot and I have clay feet,'' he said.
He suggested that paraplegics set ``a small goal each week and leave the big things to President Nixon.''
No job was too large for the West Virginian in a wheelchair. When the barge Mohawk (300 feet long, weighing 5,000 gross tons) slammed into the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel in December of 1967, badly damaging the southernmost span, Spencer was selected to remove the barge.
He directed the removal of the barge from the bridge's highway - shouting his orders from a radio-equipped station wagon to the tugs beside the span.
About five years later, a 235-foot Weeks Dredging and Contracting barge weighing 600 tons crashed into the bridge-tunnel, planting its bow under the southernmost span.
Spencer got a lot of help from the U.S. Navy salvage ship, but he and his men removed the Weeks barge as well. Cantankerous at times, Spencer feuded verbally with the Navy for more than 20 years until the day in 1969 the Navy rescued him - by helicopter - from a sinking barge off Smith Island. He never cursed the Navy again. ``I've gotten religion,'' he said, brusquely.
A voracious reader and born yarn-spinner, he did little salvage work after the 1980s.
Skipper Lane Briggs of Rebel Marine Service, the prominent marine salvager in Norfolk, said he visited his friend from time to time over the years after, that seeking Cap'n Jack's advice.
``He was a genius at salvage work,'' Briggs said. ``I learned a lot from him, and he took a lot of knowledge with him when he left us. He was about the last of the old-time salvagers.
``They won't make another one like him,'' Briggs added.
He sure got that right. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
Salvage boat skipper Charles "Jack" Spencer of Virginia Beach died
last week at the age of 80.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE by CNB