“Any situation you put him in, he was going to turn out to be a leader.”

That’s how lawyer H. Woodrow Crook said he’ll remember Obed “O.A.” Spady, whose decades of civic service to Isle of Wight County spanned multiple volunteer organizations and 16 years representing Carrollton on the county’s Board of Supervisors, the last eight as chairman.

Spady died Jan. 15 at age 89, three months shy of what would have been his 90th birthday.

According to his obituary, he was born April 29, 1935, in the unincorporated fishing village of Battery Park to the late Lawrence and Elizabeth Spady and returned home in 1960 to work at his father’s business, Battery Park Fish & Oyster Co., after earning a business administration degree from Virginia Tech and three years in the Air Force.

He was first elected to represent the Carrollton-centric Newport District on the Board of Supervisors in 1968 and served through 1976 while remaining an advocate for the county’s watermen when Virginia, in 1975, imposed a commercial fishing ban on the James River in response to an environmental disaster at a chemical plant in Hopewell.

According to the James River Association, a nonprofit that monitors and advocates for the river and its tributaries, Virginia imposed the ban, which would remain in place for the next 13 years, after workers at the Life Science Products Co. chemical plant in Hopewell, roughly an hour west of Smithfield, began falling ill from exposure to Kepone – a toxic pesticide that, according to Daily Press reporting, the plant had been secretly dumping into the James since 1966.

“Between Kepone and other industrial waste we’re not catching what we should,” Spady told the Suffolk News-Herald in a 1978 interview.

By 1979, according to a Smithfield Times interview that year, he’d become a vigorous spokesman for the seafood industry and criticized conclusions from the National Cancer Institute the state had used to justify its closing the James River to commercial fishing.

“He was very much involved in the industry and was involved in state positions,” said Crook, who first met and became friends with Spady during their time attending and playing football for Smithfield High School.

Spady eventually became a director of the Virginia Seafood Council and the Shellfish Institute of North America, and by 1988 had been recognized for his continued support of Virginia Tech’s marine sciences program.

Crook, who ran for his first term as commonwealth’s attorney the same year Spady ran for his first term on the Board of Supervisors, said the only leadership experience they had at the time was their involvement with the Real Smithfield Jaycees, a civic club of which Spady was president at the time.

Crook would go on to serve 12 years as Isle of Wight’s top prosecutor, followed by 22 years as county attorney, where he served as legal adviser to the supervisors during Spady’s 1992-2000 tenure on the board.

“He was an outstanding board member; Isle of Wight County and Virginia Tech were his two favorite entities,” Crook said. “He was always a gentleman and courteous and polite. I never knew him to have an enemy, even in politics.”

Phillip Bradshaw, who served alongside Spady in the 1990s as the board’s Carrsville representative, said one of Spady’s biggest priorities was revitalizing Isle of Wight County’s school system.

“Our schools were old and hadn’t been kept up and maintained,” Bradshaw recalled.

According to the Times archives, Spady’s time on the board saw a $20 million first phase of a capital improvements plan fund the construction of Carrollton Elementary in 1993 and Windsor High School in 1994.

“O.A. was a prudent fiscal conservative who supported public education and was an early proponent of controlled residential growth,” said Steve Edwards, who’d served with Spady and Bradshaw as a fellow supervisor in the 90s. “His even temper and good business sense made him the perfect example of what a public servant should be.”

Spady, according to a column by Times Publisher Emeritus John Edwards, once championed a shortened route from the fishing village of Rescue to the James River Bridge that became a “back door” to Smithfield, creating the route from Nike Park to Titus Creek and Smiths Neck roads that many drivers now use as an alternative to reaching the bridge by way of Benns Church, Brewers Neck and Carrollton boulevards.

Bradshaw said another of Spady’s priorities was diversifying the county’s sources of tax revenue, 40% of which at that time came from the former Union Camp paper mill, now operated by International Paper, at the county’s border with the city of Franklin. Fearing the mill would one day close, Spady pushed for industrial development in central and southern Isle of Wight, birthing the Shirley T. Holland Intermodal Park on the outskirts of the town of Windsor.

By 2000, Cost Plus World Market had announced its intention to build a distribution center in the new industrial park. Spady’s worries proved prophetic in 2009 when International Paper shuttered the mill, but IP later repurposed and reopened it by 2012.

Outside of his role as an elected official, Spady was a board member at Isle of Wight Academy, an advisory committee member of the Isle of Wight Volunteer Rescue Squad and a 63-year member of the Smithfield Rotary Club. In 1973, he became the third recipient of the Rotary and Ruritan clubs’ Citizen of the Year award, which the two clubs have awarded annually since 1971 to an outstanding area resident. 

He was also a “big Hokie” and would frequently attend Virginia Tech football games, Bradshaw said.

“He was always inviting us over to his tailgate. I could always call him … always ran into him at the Smithfield Station,” Bradshaw said. 

“His passing is certainly a big loss to be felt by many,” Crook said.