Robert Bruce Spencer Jr., retired judge, dies at 87

During the day-to-day drama in his courtroom, Judge Robert Bruce Spencer Jr. would peer over half-frame reading glasses as he heard cases from speeding tickets to landlord-tenant disputes.

"When those glasses would slide to the tip of his nose, lawyers and defendants knew there was going to be trouble," said his son, Robert Bruce Spencer III of Powhatan County.

For a person coming into court for a traffic offense, "it was really sort of a scary thing," said Buckingham County lawyer J. Robert Snoddy III.

"He would look over those glasses and then proceed to explain to the defendant why he was guilty -- it seemed he was hell-bent on convincing the defendant. A lot of judges are so short with the public, but Judge Spencer would let the defendant respond, and then he would tell him why he was wrong."

In the "cursing and abusing" assault cases, "he could figure out the undercurrents. What the lawyers missed, he would find out," Snoddy said.

Judge Spencer, who retired in 1995 from the general district courts of Buckingham, Cumberland, Appomattox and Mecklenburg counties, died of congestive heart failure Oct. 17 at his son's Powhatan home. The Dillwyn resident was 87.

Troopers and sheriff's deputies will be his pallbearers and judges and lawyers will be honorary pallbearers at a funeral today, Saturday, at 2 p.m. at First Baptist Church in Dillwyn. Burial, with Masonic rites and military honors, will be in the Dillwyn Town Cemetery.

A Dillwyn native who always had wanted to be a lawyer, Judge Spencer began practicing in Dillwyn in 1952. He served in the Army in France during World War II and graduated in 1947 from Hampden-Sydney College and in 1951 from the Washington and Lee University Law School.

He was named a part-time judge in 1960 and a full-time judge in 1979. He continued to substitute in the court system through March, when he became ill.

He loved golf and had been a course marshal at the Brandermill Country Club.

He also loved to laugh, his son said.

In the last weeks of his life, when Judge Spencer was to go by ambulance from one hospital to another lying on a gurney of the school colors of Hampden-Sydney College's archrival, Randolph-Macon College, he quipped, "Drag me behind the ambulance!"

In addition to his son, survivors include his wife of 54 years, Ann Shepherd Spencer.