DATE: Saturday, October 11, 1997            TAG: 9710110003

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B8   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   71 lines

WILLIAM BELSER SPONG JR. GREAT VIRGINIAN THE FORMER U.S. SENATOR WAS TAKEN TOO SOON

Lawyer. Gentleman. Educator. Scholar. Legislator. Statesman. Former U.S. Sen. William B. Spong Jr., age 77 at his death this week, was all these and more. Virginia has lost an invaluable friend and public asset.

His intelligence, knowledge, integrity and sound judgment enriched the commonwealth. As lawmaker, leader of two higher-education institutions and citizen-at-large, Spong was a healer, restorer, enhancer. Education and public service were his primary passions. Both had been instilled by his mother, a civic activist who served 23 years on Portsmouth's School Board, 13 as chairman; a city school bears her name.

As Portsmouth's senator in the Virginia General Assembly in the 1950s, Spong chaired a two-year study of public education in Virginia, including kindergarten and college. In 1976, three years after a single term as a U.S. senator, he became dean of the foundering Marshall-Wythe School of Law at the College of William and Mary. The American Bar Association had warned that the school's certification would be withdrawn unless deficiencies - including an inadequate library - were not remedied.

Spong turned the historic law school around and led it to new heights. He raised millions of dollars for construction. He added faculty and students and greatly expanded the number of books in the library. He established the Bill of Rights Law Institute.

At age 45, he had edged out Virginia's popular senior senator, 79-year-old A. Willis Robinson, by 611 votes in the 1966 Democratic primary election. A respected conservative and champion of conservation, Robertson lost to Spong in part because, as the late Richmond newspaper editor and historian Virginius Dabney noted, ``a group of political thinkers in the Neanderthal tradition calling themselves the Virginia Conservative party . . . urged their followers to stay out of the primary.'' Robertson and two other Virginia congressional leaders had offended the group by not resigning from the ``foul and filty'' Democratic party.

Dabney accurately described Spong's campaigning style: ``Since Spong was not well known throughout the state, he spent most of his time pumping hands in every corner of the commonwealth. In his speeches, he relied on a sober presentation of the facts, expressed in an almost startling drawl.''

Six years later, moderate-Democrat Spong was defeated by Republican Rep. William L. Scott. Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, a liberal opposed to the Vietnam War who headed the 1972 Democratic ticket, was not to the taste of Virginians or the nation. A combination of anti-McGovern sentiment and Spong's failure to respond to his opponent's attack ads boosted Scott to victory and brought genuine two-party politics to a Democratic Party stronghold.

But abundant opportunities for public service exist beyond the political arena. Spong selectively seized them to the betterment of Portsmouth, Hampton Roads and Virginia. He chaired a state commission charged with identifying Virginia's needs in the 21st century. He accepted a call to be an interim president of Old Dominion University (1989-90) in the wake of a traumatic presidency; Spong lifted faculty morale and gained substantial funding for the school from the General Assembly.

Spong also was, variously, a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, an adjunct law professor at the University of Richmond and the Salzburg Seminar, a senior advanced legal studies visting instructor at the University of London, a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Virginia Law School, an honored lecturer at the Australian National University, a member of the Virginia Council of Higher Education and a trustee of Hampden-Sydney University, where he was an undergraduate. He was the person most responsible for the successful campaign that raised money for the excellent Children's Museum of Virginia in Portsmouth.

He was ``Billy'' to his many friends, associates and acquaintances. His abrupt departure is mourned even as his life is gratefully recalled and praised. He was a human being of the first rank. Customarily, no one says that a man of his years was cut down prematurely. But we are not alone in our belief and regret that he was taken too soon, too soon.

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