Virginia native found freedom long before he left prison

Jun. 21—HENDERSON

Once a coach, always a coach.

Kenneth Spellman comes from an athletic background. His brother Freddie coached Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer Alonzo Mourning back home in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Being a star athlete in the extended Spellman family is a fairly normal occurrence and that includes Kenneth, who was a multi-sport standout for the Braves of Indian River High School before joining Norfolk State University on a wrestling scholarship.

Kenneth, now 63, happened into coaching for a private Norfolk gymnastics club in the early 1980s, beginning initially as a spotter before absorbing more about the sport and helping several young female athletes win their regionals and qualify for a Junior Olympics meet in Colorado.

Most that know Kenneth Spellman as "Coach" now associate the title with relationships they had with him in prisons like Harnett or Franklin Correctional, where Spellman did time and developed a reputation as a spiritual leader, life coach and lethal 3-point threat during recreation time.

Spellman was released in 2019 after serving 19 years.

The emotional transition out of incarceration has been seamless because as Spellman sees it, "I'm on a different field, but I'm still playing the same game."

"I don't feel any different than I did then," Spellman said. "The feeling when I get up and I step out of the door to go to work is the same feeling I had in [prison] when they say, 'Yard open. You can go to the yard now.' "

Spellman, who is Black, made those comments last week from his Henderson office on Satterwhite Point Road, where he purchased the remaining part of 16.5 acres of land from the Wortham family.

The land, Spellman and others have been told, once housed slaves. His Ken's Construction Co. office, located in a small, shed-like structure, sits right among the remnants of the slave quarters he's restoring. The juxtaposition of a Black man now owning this property is not lost on Spellman, who has dubbed it "Back to Eden."

After getting out of prison in 2019, Spellman eventually founded Ken's Construction with wife Laurece while making a series of real estate investments that have enabled him to live out his dream of owning a sizable piece of land. Land where he could grow gardens and welcome family and friends for gatherings.

The history of the property, on which Spellman has unearthed some fascinating discoveries, isn't central to his personal story of striving for success, and his desire to pass that onto others.

More significant perhaps is that the property is his. That he's free to make it what he wants. That he knows how to overcome the odds. And that he believes he can help others follow in his footsteps to achieve success, whether financially or personally.

"I always knew who had the ball," Spellman said of his time in prison. "I knew whether I was on offense or defense that day. So I knew which way I had to play and I knew how hard I had to play, and I knew how much energy I had to save for the fourth quarter."

The clock has never stopped ticking.

Tools of the trade

Understanding how Spellman went from more than a decade and a half in prison to owning his own construction company, and numerous properties, requires considering his personal makeup before he spent so much time in prison.

His business acumen didn't come out of nowhere.

No stranger to entrepreneurship, Spellman started his first construction company in Virginia after spending his early to mid 20s in Houston working for Shell Oil Co. in research and development.

All that despite studying criminal justice and health and physical education in college. He figured teaching wouldn't yield the most financially lucrative career, so he opted for something different.

Spellman learned the ins and outs of producing synthetically-produced concrete with Lone Star Industries, which merged with Shell. At Shell, he helped develop and market products like high voltage insulators, traveling around the country to do so, while also being entrusted to assemble laboratory staffs.

Before leaving Houston, Spellman worked as a consultant for another materials plant and later did a variety of work for McCallum Testing Laboratories near home in Chesapeake, Virginia, before starting the construction business.

Over the years, Spellman accrued practical knowledge in the fields of science and construction but also more abstract sectors of the business world like corporate hierarchy, budgets, communication, and management.

The tools he needed to carve out a place for himself in prison as a leader were already, largely, in place.

Winning

Last week, in his office on what was once the Wortham property, Spellman revealed evidence of the 7,437 letters he sent from prison from roughly 2004 to 2017.

Not only did he send out thousands of handwritten letters, he kept remarkably detailed and even color-coded logs of who he sent them to and what the occasion was. The categories include "Thinking of You," "Birthday", "Thank You," "Pictures," "Mothers Day," "Legal" and "Brochure."

"I did it so I would know who I wrote," Spellman said, "when I wrote them and what I wrote them about in case I had to follow up with them the next month."

Always at the top of the mailing lists were his mom, son Kenny Jr., grandchildren, daughters, ex-wife, bishop, and brothers.

In December 2015, Spellman sent out 66 cards. Sometimes, he averaged penning seven to eight letters per day, writing mostly to people he had never even met. This, on a salary of $2.70 per week with stamps available for purchase at 50 cents a pop.

Some of the incarcerated spent their dimes on drugs or food and drink. Spellman cashed in on what he calls "outreach."

He'd find out when people were sick, people he didn't even know, and send them get-well cards while having his fellow inmates sign them. He'd have his mother or another relative give them a call if there was a close enough connection.

Spellman's crowning work while in prison was the development of what he calls the M.E.A.T. program — Ministry, Management, Entrepreneurship, Accountability and Training.

He wrote enough pages to form a book out of it, and even had the program copyrighted. Inmates flocked to him in the yard, so much so, he said, that it drew the suspicion of the guards.

A few weeks after being released, he presented on his ideas in a recidivism conference in a fancy Chicago hotel. Quite a contrast from the rural, barbed-wire prison encampments of Bunn and Lillington.

"People want to be successful," Spellman said, describing the essence of his how-to manual. "They want to be good parents. They want to be successful in business. They want to be successful in the community. It's the same thing. Guys wanted to be successful in there. They wanted to be good fathers. So the principle of the program is success and being able to be an asset to your community and not a liability."

As Spellman hinted, he's not done teaching, and his program transcends beyond the walls of prison.

From inside the old Wortham house, now The Spellman House, he's hosting classes centered on his teachings, attracting the likes of Elaine Chavis-Young, who met Spellman when she needed some work done on her house.

Chavis-Young, 74, formerly served as a mental health director in Henderson and retired from the State Department of Public Safety after 10 years as an HIV outreach nurse, one of 11 in the state prison system.

"It didn't bother me because people are people," Chavis-Young said of Spellman's incarceration. "We make mistakes. We all need a second chance."

That's why Chavis-Young directs people in need of a bounce-back to Spellman, who has a hired a number of returning citizens for construction work or to help around the Back to Eden premises.

Spellman stays in touch with many of the people he met in prison that credit him for changing their life paths. Some of their printed testimonials are placed throughout his big house.

Spellman said he never spent much time contemplating newfound freedom because even in prison, he never felt he wasn't free. He felt he was doing what he was called to do: change lives.

The fourth quarter Spellman mentioned?

It started when he received his release date. And the game's not over for Coach Ken Spellman.

"I'm still in the fourth quarter now," Spellman said, "so I'm enjoying the fact that we've got the lead."

This is the first of a two-part feature on Kenneth Spellman. Find out what Spellman has in store for his new Satterwhite Point property in Part II, available in Thursday's Dispatch.