An Accidental Success: 100-year-old World War II veteran inventor Clavel Bennett shares stories

“As you can see, I take really good care of this place; I like to let things grow, weeds and all,” joked Clavel Bennett, as he pointed to the current state of his 3-acre property in Camp Verde.

As he surveyed the grounds, which receive slightly less maintenance than they used to, he described how he fell in love with pecan trees and later invested in commercial shelling equipment as a post-retirement hobby.

A former design engineer, inventor, business owner and World War II veteran who turned 100 years old in October, Bennett spent many years living in metropolitan areas including San Diego and Phoenix with his wife and two daughters. In the 1990s, he began growing weary of urban life and was nearing retirement, so he decided it was time for a move, perhaps to somewhere a little closer to his “West Virginia hillbilly” roots.

“I came up here to Camp Verde looking for a place to buy, and I just accidentally ended up on this street, and I stopped and looked at it,” he said of the property, which had been planted with numerous pecan, mulberry and sycamore trees. As it turned out, the majesty of the trees proved irresistible.

“I was fascinated; there were all these big trees … I just really liked the trees,” he explained.

His love of trees quickly became a hobby.

Not the type to just sit around during retirement, Bennett decided to become a pecan farmer and planted even more trees. He later added a shelling business, which, at its height, earned him about $4,000 per season.

Bennett said he “read a few articles” on how to cultivate and shell pecans but learned the rest through years of observation.

At one point, he was the primary provider of shelling ser­vices in the Verde Valley.

“I used to do 400 to 500 pounds per person,” Bennett said of his numerous customers, who had previously traveled to Tucson for shelling services.

“I charged 50 cents a pound, then 60 cents, then later 70 cents.”

Nowadays, Bennett has only a couple of long-time customers left, whom he has taught to use his equipment for personal use, as his eyesight and hearing are not as good as they used to be.

“I only charge them 35 cents a pound,” he said.

When discussing his age and health, Bennett’s demeanor became somber.

“I’m slowing down, especially in this last year,” he admitted. “This old age is getting to me.”

Otherwise, he remains good-humored, good-natured and a bit on the mischievous side.

Before we were introduced, I was warned that he could be a bit of a prankster. True to form, during our first encounter, he ended up nearly convincing me he had designed “special glasses” that didn’t need actual glass to function. After realizing I’d given him a little too much credit for his high-tech inven­tions, I resolved to keep a closer eye out during our conversation.

MIT and World War II

At the beginning of World War II, Bennett was living in Akron, Ohio, with his mother and sister after they had decided to leave West Virginia farm life behind. When the War Department began conscripting male civilians, Bennett, who was about 16 at the time, decided to volunteer for the U.S. Navy rather than be drafted into the U.S. Army.

“I went to enlist [in the Navy] and that’s how I wound up in the Coast Guard,” Bennett said. He was standing in line to enlist when a Coast Guard recruiter walked up and said, “I need five guys.”

“Everybody’s hand went up because we were all volunteers, and the guy said, ‘You, you, you … come with me,’ and I was one of them,” Bennett recalled.

After Bennett had been selected, he was given an IQ test, which he joked that he “failed.”

“I always tell everybody I failed the IQ test, which I made that up, you can’t fail,” he laughed.

As it turned out, Bennett’s test scores were so high that he was directed to take the test a second time. Officers did not tell him how well he had done, but he was left behind when everyone else in his company was deployed, which led to some obvious confusion.

“I didn’t get shipped out, so I was waiting,” Bennett said. “I went to the office and asked why I wasn’t shipped out … the officer said he didn’t know but said he’d check on it.”

Meanwhile, for about a month, Bennett was assigned the role of platoon leader for new recruits until he was informed that he was to be sent to Silver Springs, Md., to study radio operations.

Upon graduating at the top of his class, Bennett was sent to Groton, Conn., to undertake a five-part engineering program developed by the Massachu­setts Institute of Technology which would ultimately lead to Bennett’s deployment to Okun­ishima Island off the coast of Japan, where he was assigned as a LORAN technician.

LORAN, a hyperbolic radio navigation system, was developed by MIT during the war to provide accurate navi­gation fixes for convoys crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

“At that time, the Coast Guard didn’t have any tech­nicians,” Bennett explained. “They needed technicians to set up the equipment … we’re talking about equipment that was designed using vacuum tubes; there were no solid state devices.”

Vacuum tubes, otherwise known as cathode ray tubes, are used to manipulate electron beams to display images on a phosphorescent screen. The technology was costly and dif­ficult to implement and was limited to military and com­mercial use only at the time.

By the time Bennett was deployed, it was 1945, and his work had barely begun when the United States detonated atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“I’d assumed all this was being done to prepare for the invasion of Japan and then all at once they dropped the atomic bomb and that was the end of the war in Japan,” he said. “The devel­opment of the atomic bomb was done very, very secretly … I’d never heard anything about it until they dropped the damn thing.”

Bennett recalled how he was left waiting on Okunishima for a time before he was discharged.

“It just took so much time because when you have thou­sands of troops in and around Okinawa and different areas, and they all want to come home at the same time … the war is over, it takes a long time to get them home,” he said.

When asked if he missed his family during his years of service, Bennett replied that he was “too busy” to think about it.

“In the two or three years that I was in the Coast Guard, I only had two [shore] leaves, one five-day and one 10-day, and there were two days of transportation; it was only two times that I was home.”

Postwar Career

After returning from Japan, Bennett began looking for work and quickly realized there was no need for LORAN technicians. However, his next calling pre­sented itself to him before he’d even made it back to Akron.

“There was a stop that we’d made, a layover, and there was a jukebox there,” Bennett said with a smile. “I was so fascinated with that jukebox … that’s the business I wanted to get into … I didn’t know anything about the music industry but I thought it would be a good thing to get into because all you had to do was put a coin in and collect the money … that sounded pretty good to me.”

One thing led to another and Bennett ended up buying and servicing jukeboxes and other gaming equipment in and around Akron, finding himself surrounded by “rough characters” who were involved in organized crime.

“These were not very nice people … there was a murder trial … these were people you didn’t fool with,” he said.

Bennett described how he was granted access and “tolerated” by his contractors, who at the time controlled music and gaming operations throughout the region and otherwise did not generally associate with people who did not share their Sicilian heritage.

“I was a good technician, and the military had educated me,” he explained. “These people were very, very loyal to the mil­itary. I could do no wrong.”

Because of his pristine public image, Bennett was eventually appointed president of the Summit County Music Operators Association. “The reason I was appointed is because I didn’t have any [criminal] record,” he laughed.

As the years passed, Bennett gained a high level of respect for his work and his ability to “keep his mouth shut” and eventually received an offer to take control of one of his contractor’s areas, but instead decided to sell his business and walk away before it was too late.

“I turned [the offer] down because I knew what it was all about, and once you get under their thumb, you don’t get out,” he said in a serious tone.

Bar Owner

After that, Bennett decided it was time for a fresh start and relocated to San Diego at the suggestion an old friend he knew from his time in the Coast Guard. Now married with daughters, he had to find work quickly. He ended up as the owner of a country and western bar, which he referred to as a “rough joint” where regular brawls took place.

In spite of his best intentions, Bennett found himself having to take on the role of a ruthless leader, which, as he described it, went against his nature.

“I’ve done some things I’m not proud of,” he admitted. “I had good teachers. I ran a rough joint and I had to control it, and I did control it. I learned you don’t give nobody a second chance. At the time I weighed about 200 pounds and I knew how to put a man unconscious in a matter of seconds,” he added, describing the manner in which he learned how to perform a chokehold in order to render troublemakers helpless so he could throw them out the front doors.

“I never hit anybody, that’s not the way you do it.”

Bennett also described how, at the time, he was not above a little bribery, and had plied a few of the best local brawlers with enough whiskey to give them an interest in lending him a bit of their muscle when needed.

“They turned out to be some of my best supporters,” he chuckled.

After a while, Bennett decided to renovate the bar in an attempt to give it a new feel. “I made it into more of a cocktail lounge, and it was never as suc­cessful as it was when it was just a rough joint, so I got out of that bar and bought a bar in Chula Vista.”

Soon after buying the new bar, Bennett’s engineering talents resurfaced when he realized he could increase his profits and avoid additional liquor taxes by developing a more efficient filling system.

Bennett showed me a photo of a newspaper clipping from the Chula Vista Star News show­casing his first invention, which the paper had dubbed “the auto­mated bartender.” The device, which was similar to a soda dis­penser, provided precision filling without the spillage that resulted from hand-pouring.

“I was the first guy in the country to build one,” Bennett said. Soon after that, he started receiving requests from bar­tenders across the region.

From then on, Bennett designed and patented several incarnations of the automatic bartender, which were produced and sold by various manufac­turers, leading to a lengthy career as a design engineer and international consultant.

“I was an independent con­tractor, I never really had a ‘job’,” Bennett said. “A lot of people came to me.”

Despite all of his successes, which included designs for the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas as well as Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, Bennett is extremely humble.

“I’m no outstanding engineer … I’m not even a good engineer,” he said.

When asked whether his humility was due to his early life in rural Appalachia, Bennett replied that it “probably” had something to do with it.

At that point, his daughter Sharon Lara chimed in. “It was his mother, Goldie, she is the reason why he’s the man he is.”

Lara and Bennett recalled a story from Bennett’s childhood about how Goldie, whom Lara described as a “saint that could play any musical instrument,” nurtured Bennett’s natural curiosity.

One year for Christmas, Bennett received a toy that he promptly disassembled in the front yard. When a neighbor stopped by, they began to question Goldie’s judgment, asking her why she would allow her son to do such a thing. She replied,” Just let him do it, he knows what he’s doing.”

“Sure enough, he put it back together,” Lara said affectionately.

While Bennett’s mother pro­vided trust, his father, whom he described as a stern man, taught him about the value of honesty.

“When you live on a farm in West Virginia, you learn certain things … you don’t tell a lie … that was the first advice I received from my father … when you do something you have to face up to it, you don’t tell no lie,” Bennett said. He added that the most important thing to him to this day remains his family.

“My daughter, she’s important,” he said of Lara, who currently lives next door and oversees his care. Other family members include Bennett’s niece and her children, who visit from nearby Mayer.

“Sometimes they come over and pick up pecans,” he said.

Looking Back

Looking back on his long and colorful life, Bennett said that most of his successes were “accidental.”

“It’s a fact; so many things are discovered accidentally,” he said, adding, “I wasn’t afraid to try something different.

“I’ve tried many things that have failed. When you’re doing engineering and you’re doing something that hasn’t been done, you have failures, but you can’t let failures stop you. You have to take another breath and keep going.”

Bennett said he felt his greatest sense of accomplishment during the years he was working in elec­tronics design.

“I was writing [programs] before they had micropro­cessors,” Bennett said, pro­ducing a handmade conversion device that he had used to convert between base 10 and base 16 numerals, allowing him to translate numbers between the decimal and hexadecimal systems so they could be con­verted to binary code.

Bennett said that necessity inspired him to create.

“Nobody had done it yet,” he said, reflecting on his inventions.

At this point, Bennett is no longer able to focus on complex systems, but is instead doing his best to enjoy life’s simple pleasures, like cooking sausage and eggs, visiting with his family and enjoying his surroundings.

“I don’t get up to much, espe­cially this year, now I’ve got this damn [brace] on my leg,” he said with an air of exasperation.

Bennett was born in October 1923. While he admitted that his memory is not what it used to be, he added that now he’s reached the century mark, he’s been “been pretty fortunate in sticking to reality” and has always taken good care of his health.

“I never smoked, hardly ever drank,” he said.

Bennett’s candor about longevity is telling. When I remarked that not everyone has the privilege of growing old, he replied, “I don’t know if it’s a privilege.”

“You young people, you’ve got a way to go,” Bennett noted, which I took to mean he’d rather not explain the finer points of aging. Perhaps some things are best left to experience.