Preston Lea “Pete” Spruance Jr. died on July 23, 2024 in Eureka. He had celebrated his 91st birthday just nine days earlier and said he was quite elated to have made it that far.

Pete was born July 14, 1933 in Norfolk, Virginia to Preston Lea Spruance and Margaret Halsey Spruance. He grew up in Wilmington, Delaware and attended Tower Hill School. He prepared at The Lawrenceville School where he graduated Cum Laude. While at Lawrenceville, he played football, contributed poems and essays to the quarterly literary publication winning a coveted essay prize, and played trombone in a Dixieland dance band.

Pete loved sailing and owned a few motor and sailboats, and he crewed on ocean racing boats during his early years on the East Coast. He spent a brief time at Princeton and MIT before settling on Ithaca College, where he had a double major in math and music, graduating Magna Cum Laude with Departmental Honors in Mathematics. Later, he earned a masters degree in Human Behavior at United States International University.

In the mid-1980s, he completed the course work at Humboldt State University for what he smilingly termed “another worthless masters degree.” When his papers were lost, he was asked to fill in teaching anthropology to incoming students, an experience he thoroughly enjoyed.

In 1960 the Navy brought him and other East Coast family members to Coronado, California for the 50th anniversary celebration of Naval Aviation and the dedication of Halsey Field at the North Island Naval Air Station to his grandfather, Fleet Admiral William Frederick Halsey, Jr. He raised the commissioning pennant on the newly commissioned USS Halsey DDG 97 in San Diego 45 years later.

In 1961 he left his actuarial department job at John Hancock, Boston, to accept a job offer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, as statistician in charge of data processing for research projects. While living in San Diego, Pete would be known to single-hand his skipjack schooner to Catalina Island. In the mid-1960s he picked up the trombone again to play weekly in the Jewel City Jass Band to SRO crowds at a nightspot in La Jolla.

He met his future wife, Nancy, in 1964 in San Francisco while accompanying a couple of other West Coast Spruances who had gathered to pay a visit to Admiral Raymond Spruance, retired, living on the Monterey Peninsula. Pete and Nancy were married later that year in Sausalito and continued living in San Diego County. Their two sons, Bruce and Trey, were born in 1966 and 1969 respectively.

Pete’s work career in San Diego as systems analyst on tactical data systems and other areas of research continued at Univac and other defense contract-oriented corporations. When the defense contract market softened in the late 1960s, he became a broker in commercial real estate sales. In the late 1970s, Pete was invited to return to government contract work, and he relocated his family to Eureka to manage a contract at the naval facility Centerville Beach. He retired in 1984 when that contract ended.

He was an enthusiastic and passionate learner who had many interests. Once captured by a subject, he would get to work learning fundamentals before proceeding. As an amateur radio operator (KE6LF), he built his first radio, a Heathkit, and spent decades communicating with other hams, working at repeater sites and volunteering his services where needed as an Emergency Coordinator with OES, the Red Cross and at some very lively Kinetic Sculpture races in the early 1980s. An interest in birds bolstered by Cornell Lab’s correspondence course on birds opened many years of local fun and adventurous trips and a life list of over 1,000 world birds. During this time, he discovered small-ship expedition cruising, which took him to all seven continents and over 100 islands, inhabited and uninhabited, searching for endemics. When Zodiac rides became too challenging, he turned to Atlantic crossings on small ships and on three- and five-masted sailing ships for the sheer joy of being on the water.

Pete was a loving husband and father who anchored his family by allowing personal growth to blossom unhindered and encouraged and assisted his sons’ likes and passions as those grew and evolved. An example of this dedication would be his 26-year twilight career (from 1998 to 2024) handling the complex duties at the management helm of his son’s small record company, website and retail mail-order business.

Pete loved taking his family on camping trips throughout California and the West, listening to and discussing classical music, and was an avid reader on many subjects – the great number of books he had amassed on the age of sail and naval history before he crossed over the bar attests to his passionate range of life-interests.

Pete is survived by his wife of close to 60 years, Nancy; sons Halsey Brewster “Bruce” Spruance (Alisha); Preston Lea “Trey” Spruance, III (Fernanda); brother William Halsey Spruance (Gretchen); sister Alice Spruance Talbot (Richmond); and grandson Jacob Logan Spruance. He was predeceased by his parents and sister, Margaret Grandy Spruance Denham.

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The obituary above was submitted on behalf of Pete Spruance’s loved ones. The Lost Coast Outpost runs obituaries of Humboldt County residents at no charge. See guidelines here. Email news@lostcoastoutpost.com.