Charlie, who served on a special team to set up and direct the broadcast of Olympic Games for NBC-TV in Seoul in 1988 and Barcelona in 1992, died July 20, 2009, of congestive heart failure in New Haven, Conn. He was 87.
Born in Stamford, Conn., he graduated from the King School, where he lettered in four sports. He majored in electrical engineering at Princeton, played 150-pound football, and was in Cannon Club. During World War II he trained for six months at the Harvard-MIT radar program and served three years in the Navy.
Charlie worked first for General Electric and then for Dr. Allen B. Dumont, a pioneer in TV broadcast technology. With friends, he founded Visual Electronics, a dynamic start-up firm, and worked there for many years before joining NBC-TV.
Upon retirement, he and his wife, the former Patricia Sullivan, whom he married in 1953, lived in Huntington Bay, N.Y. He took up watercolor painting and served on the boards of the Art League of Huntington and the C.W. Post Library. Recently the Spicers lived in North Branford, Conn.
In addition to his wife, Charlie is survived by three children, Charles Jr., Geoffrey, and Elly; and two grandsons, Tyler and Cameron.