Charles Spence, timber man with affinity for Far East

Charles Spence is being remembered as a loyal businessman who combined his family's forest-products export company and his appreciation of Japanese culture to build a regional timber business that prospered during Japan's post-World War II economic boom.

Mr. Spence, who spent most of his adult life at the helm of Seattle-based Pacific Lumber and Shipping, died last Tuesday (Nov. 4). He was 86.

Mr. Spence, of Seattle, also is remembered for his ties to the University of Washington's business school, where he graduated in 1939. In recent years, his donations helped students and educators travel and study in Asia. It was this affinity for the Far East, especially Japan, that charted much of his professional life.

"His father had started the business there. He appreciated Japanese culture," Tom Spence said of his father. "The Japanese appreciated him. He was very kind to many of them after the war when many people weren't."

Charles Lewis Spence was born in Seattle in 1917. He graduated from Roosevelt High School and rowed while at the UW.

The summer after he graduated from high school, he signed on with the crew of an oil tanker steaming to Vladivostok, Russia. He spent the voyage in the bowels of the ship, wiping down pistons in the engine room. Although Mr. Spence later was a member of the Seattle Yacht Club and enjoyed boating in Puget Sound and Canadian waters, that early experience cured him of pursuing a career in the maritime industry, his son said.

A second summer job, at a local sawmill, also taught Charles Spence the true meaning of hard work.

"I was a cocky young guy and thought I knew about everything," Mr. Spencer told the UW Business Magazine in 2002. "At the mill I worked alongside this great big Swede who threw those timbers around like they were kindling. At the end of the day I'd go home on my hands and knees."

During World War II, Mr. Spence served in Navy intelligence, mostly stationed in the Seattle region. After the war, he followed in his father's footsteps.

Mr. Spence's father was working in the timber business when the Great Kanto earthquake killed 140,000 people in Japan in 1923. The elder Spence soon was making contacts in Japan, providing timber and the pillars needed to rebuild ports. Those contacts where helpful when the elder Spence established Pacific Lumber and Shipping in the early 1930s.

Charles Spence remained loyal to those contacts when he joined the business after the war, and when he took over after his father's death a few years later.

Under Mr. Spence's leadership, Pacific Lumber and Shipping was instrumental in launching an offshore market for Pacific Northwest logs, said Jerry Weed, who started working for Mr. Spence in 1977.

A catalyst was the 1962 Columbus Day storm that leveled 15 billion board feet of timber. His ties to Japan allowed Mr. Spence to create a market for the logs where a market had not existed before, said Weed, who today is the company's president and chief executive officer.

As Japan's economy grew in the 1960s and 1970s, so did Pacific Lumber and Shipping. The company also was shipping to European nations, but the bulk of its trade was with Japan.

Mr. Spence was willing to do business with the Japanese, even when some U.S. companies still harbored ill feelings from World War II. That loyalty paid off, Weed said, when some of the company's early business contacts emerged as corporate leaders, including one who rose to the top of Nissho Iwai, a Japanese trading house.

At its peak, Pacific Lumber and Shipping owned three sawmills in Washington. In recent years, the company has downsized and sold the mills, a reflection of the overall decline in the industry. But Pacific Lumber and Shipping remains in the log-export business, one of the handful of smaller companies still competing in the Japanese market. That's a continuing legacy of Mr. Spence's ties there, Weed said.

Weed said the two men had lunch a few days before Mr. Spence died. Weed said Mr. Spence questioned him about the company's shipping schedule and log inventory.

Mr. Spence was a past president of the Japan American Society. He also enjoyed boating and took refuge from Northwest winters in Napili Bay on the island of Maui in Hawaii.

In March, Mr. Spence broke his hip, and his system never recovered, his son Tom Spence said.

Mr. Spence also is survived by his wife; son Robert Spence; daughter Judy Thordarson; eight grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. The family has asked that remembrances be made to a charity of the donor's choice.

Greg Lamm: 206-464-8541 or glamm@seattletimes.com