The late O.C. Bennett shows off his favorite bird dog near his home at Vinegar Hill Community near Aurora. He was one of those outdoorsmen that the hunters of Eastern North Carolina will never forget.

Having grown up in Beaufort County in the little town of Aurora, I learned to enjoy the outdoor sports of hunting and fishing at an early age. Our Mondamin Farm was filled with wild game such as deer, bear, dove and some occasional flocks of Canada geese. Of all the animals that I really liked to hunt, my favorite game bird was the bobwhite quail. I didn’t have a dog to hunt these birds, but at that time, our ditch banks were not mowed-clean and on a brisk autumn morning you could pretty well depend on walking up a covey of these birds by just flushing them as you walked the hedgerows.

My first bird dog was a small setter puppy that one of my father’s friends gave to me. It was the very thing that I needed to really begin to quail hunt in the way that sportsmen like to call “classic bird hunting.” The problem was that I didn’t begin to know where to start when it came to properly training the pup. When I asked some of the older bird hunters who could teach me what to do, the sportsmen advised me to “call Mr. O.C. and see if he could give me some sage advice on training a bird dog.” I had no idea that O.C. was the No. 1 bird dog trainer in all of North Carolina and maybe even in the whole South.

O.C. Bennett would occasionally stop by our house. He began to help me train my first bird dog and I really learned that what little I managed to really put to practice with the dog paid off. Thanks to my lessons from O.C. I managed to have my first bird dog make a few rudimentary points on quail and hole the point until I got close enough to flush the birds and take a shot or two.

That was a long time ago.

After leaving Aurora for a four-year stay in the U.S. Air Force, I returned to North Carolina, attended NCSU, worked in some summer jobs with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission and began to pick up where I’d left off as a bird hunter. It was in those later years that I really learned to appreciate just who and what O.C. Bennett was to the large number of avid quail hunters in North Carolina, as well as many other bird hunting communities across the South. When it came to training championship bird dogs, Mr. O.C. Bennett of Vinegar Hill was “The Man” of bird dog training. Everyone knew of O.C. and his dogs.

With these memories in mint, it was with heavy heart last week when I learned of O.C. Bennett’s death. His memorial service in the Methodist Church in Aurora was filled with a lot of hunters, friends and family who had gathered there to pay their respects to O.C.

As I sat in the church, one particular memory the involved with O.C came to mind. I had just relocated to my home state and made some friends with some Canadians of note who wanted to come to Eastern North Carolina to hunt and fish. One of these friends was none other than a French Canadian from Quebec by the name of Marc Brault. He was the Consul General of Canada.

Marc had had along career of Ambassadorships across the world and was noted as being one of the top politicians for the entire country of Canada. He and his wife were visiting me in Aurora when Curtis Brown from the PCS mine (A Canadian Company) found out about our important visitor and invited us on a Quail hunt a the old plantation home over in Bath. Our guide and host for the hunt was none other that one of the top quail hunter gurus in all of America — O.C. Bennett.

As usual, under O.C.’s guidance the actual hunt was a great success. But, the evening’s activities that followed the hunt were one of the crowning points of Marc Brault’s trip to Aurora. Curtis Brown, O.C. Bennett and us hunters were treated to a fine southern style quail dinner with abundant after-dinner refreshments and a lot of good old southern hospitality to our important visitor from Canada. It was a hunt and after dinner entertainment that really made a “hit” with Marc Brault.

Years later, when I’d be talking and visiting with Marc at his home up in Canada, he’d always ask how O.C. Bennett was doing and remark to me about that delightful quail hunt at the PCS plantation near Bath. He felt that this outdoor adventure was one of his finest and was so impressed with O.C. and his beautiful, well-trained bird dogs.

As you can see, O.C. Bennett, great outdoorsman, premier bird dog trainer and friend was known on a worldwide basis. He will be sorely missed by a lot of admiring outdoorsmen, his loving family and a lot of fine bird dogs.

Happy hunting, O.C.