Mitchell Bennett has spent 95 years earning the kind of quiet respect that doesn’t always come with a ceremony attached. On Thursday morning, August 14, it came with one anyway.
At Big Mama’s Cafe in Columbia, Bennett was presented with a U.S. flag that flew over the Capitol on the Fourth of July, marking the nation’s 250th anniversary. Bennett, who served in the U.S. Navy aboard the USS Coral Sea during the Korean War, has lived his whole life around Ashland, where his family still works a farm that’s been in the family for 140 years — and where Bennett, by all accounts, still shows up for the daily chores.
His granddaughter, Lindsey Shipley, was there for the presentation. Asked to describe him, she didn’t hesitate: “one of the most loving people. Very opinionated. Keeps you in line.” It’s the kind of description that sounds like it was earned over a lot of Sunday dinners.
Bennett has four children, along with grandchildren and great-grandchildren, several of whom joined him for the occasion. For a veteran who served without much fanfare decades ago, a flag that flew over the nation’s Capitol on its 250th birthday is a small, fitting way of saying the service was noticed — and still is.
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