Evans Liberal Politics, August 23, 2010, by Paul Evans, engraving of a rainbow trout from Wikipedia:

In what appears to be a domestic dispute gone horribly wrong, a shooter killed two and wounded four others, one critically, in Louisa County, Virginia, before authorities shot the shooter fatally. So we have three dead and four wounded in yet another gun violence scenario. Louisa is the location of my own family’s former summer home, a sleepy little central Virginia town of a few thousand. My mother’s father, Herbert W. Krieger, former Curator of the Smithsonian Division of Cultural Anthropology, had 57 acres and a summer home here during the 1960′s as his retirement home.

August 23 Afternoon UPDATE: According to the Associated Press on APP.com, the shooter was a certain Charles Sponaugle, and apparently the people he killed were his son and nephew. Sponaugle apparently had an ongoing dispute over a parcel of 1.5 acres after his mother died without leaving a will. There had been approximately two dozen calls over Sponaugle and the property dispute in the past, and authorities say that no police officers were injured in the ensuing shoot out with the shooter.

The four surviving victims of the shooting have been taken to the University of Virginia’s hospital. The shooter apparently exchanged fire with law enforcement officers and was fatally shot by a deputy. Also killed in the exchange was one dog, poor fella. At least one police car got shot up. The incident took place about 2 p.m. on Sunday at Sponaugle’s trailer, and when officers arrived, Sponaugle opened fire with a .22 caliber target pistol.

According to TBD, "The gunfire occurred near Kents Mill Road and Twigg Drive in Louisa." on Sunday afternoon. Other news stories pinpoint the location as being in fact Twigg Drive. Those must be some of the newer roads that came in after they built the nuclear power plant, because I can’t remember those names from when I was a boy and we lived there. At least one of the victims has life threatening injuries, and that person was lifeflighted to UVA while the other three were transported by ambulance.

NBC29.com contributed details to my retelling of this shooting. The dead are Charles Sponaugle, his son, "29-year-old Charles Stedman, and nephew 23-year-old Mark Cooper Jr." According to NBC12.com, police "allege (that Sponaugle) also shot his sister, Kitty Cooper, 41; her husband, Mark A. Cooper Sr., 45; and two nephews, Jerrel Steadman, 26; and Jason Steadman, 27." Jason Steadman is still in the hospital and has "life threating" injuries. The dog that was killed was Sponaugle’s own Pit Bull which he had released in an attack on the police K9 that officers had set on the shooter.

Paul’s time in Louisa:

We sold our property in Louisa in 1971, when my grandfather died at the age of 81. When I was a boy we spent all of our summers there from 1960 to 1971, when we moved to Wooster, Ohio. My Dad, a Yale Ph.D. in Russian language and literature, had received a position teaching at The College of Wooster, and my family has lived here ever since.

At that time Louisa was a sleepy little central Virginia country town where not much happened, with a wonderful hardware store and a Safeway. Then, a few years after we sold our beloved “Mansion House” in the red clay country of central Virginia, we heard that a nuclear power plant was built four miles away and property values tripled. The area had clear, small creeks, pine and mixed forests, and was rather dry, most summers. Corn had a hard time thriving in the mineral-rich, red clay soil. The nearest “big city” was Charlottesville, about 50 or 60 miles to the west. Washington, D.C. is about 120 miles to the northeast and about as far away as the moon, so far as the local residents are concerned.

There were some monumental thunderstorms in late summer that I remember very vividly. I can remember the rain beating on the tin roof of “Mansion House” and also the electricity of the lightning strikes banging around in our plumbing and sometimes even popping a light bulb. Those were some real thunderstorms! There were also a lot of poisonous copperhead snakes in the vicinity that were a distinct nuisance. And there were deer ticks and huge black hairy spiders in the brush. (That was almost a good thing, exciting for little seven or eight year old boy.) Our little creek that flowed through our property, Harris Creek, used to have visible trout jumping in it, and LOTS of crayfish that were great fun for a kid to play with. Then a local oil producer polluted the creek to the point where there was somewhat of an oily sheen to the water one year.

Our home there, which had built quite a while before the civil war, had the actual cabins adjoining the home that the slaves had used for their quarters. I used to be amazed at how small they were, and at the various iron implements the slaves used for their domestic lives. My grandfather, a rather renowned anthropologist who wrote the War Studies paper on the Peoples of The Philippines and many other papers for the Smithsonian and was a Curator for decades, probably would have brought the property just for the “slave cabins” and many metal implements inside of them. We spent many happy summers there, my nuclear family and my mom’s father the anthropologist, whom we called “Grand”. He was a very kind, quiet, almost shy man, very intelligent, and we loved him very much. He was a great grandfather and was a great friend to me. I miss Grand a lot.

The home, which was rather large, had one of those promenade front porches with big white columns that you can just imagine accompanying a pre-Civil War home in the south. We used to have a canvas hammock slung across that porch, and I can remember whiling many hours away in that hammock. One summer a goldfinch built a nest on top of one of the pillars. She didn’t like visitors on “her” porch and used to dive bomb us when we tried to take naps there that year. We finally abandoned the porch that year to Mrs. Goldfinch, but didn’t let her rebuild there the next year.

There was “goldfish pond” about a hundred yards away from the home that had fallen into disrepair and was the scene of a rather infamous incident one summer. I was maybe seven years old and my father was initiating me into the fine art of driving a tractor to mow the lawn, a Cub Cadet or a Lo-Boy. He kept motioning me to drive closer and closer to the dry pond as I approached it. Well I was an obedient son and darned if I didn’t actually manage to drive the tractor right into the pond. We got our neighbor Jim over there and used thick boards to lever the tractor out of the pond again. It wasn’t very deep, maybe three feet, and there was virtually no water in it, which made things easier. The cement that made up the bottom was cracked and it wouldn’t hold water. But I remember very clearly jumping off of the tractor after I had been “guided” into the pond, and running cursing like a trooper back to the house. (I was only seven or eight years old.)

I remember in late summer we used to drive the couple of miles into "town" and buy whole huge watermelons for 3 cents. That’s not 3 cents a pound, I mean 3 cents for the whole watermelon. I could use a nice sweet slice of red watermelon tonight, couldn’t you?

Ah, I must be getting old. (I’m 53 these days.) Just thinking of those times really brings me back to life. I want to celebrate the memories of that time with a little music for us: ~ Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour:
Coming Back to Life

"Coming Back to Life:" David Gilmour does a really wonderful job at Royal Albert Hall with this old Pink Floyd classic. — 6:47

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