Humble rancher-philanthropist Peter Bennett dies at 92

Most people knew Peter Bennett — if they knew him at all — as a humble yet successful cattle rancher, with little inkling of the family fortune fueled by Klondike gold and Kern County oil that enabled him to quietly become one of Fresno’s biggest philanthropists.

Clarence Jesse “Peter” Bennett died Friday in Fresno. He was 92 year old.

Mr. Bennett was born and raised in Southern California, first in Beverly Hills and later in Palm Springs. His parents, Frank and Melba Berry Bennett, co-owned and managed the Deep Well Guest Ranch, a Palm Springs “dude ranch” that gained popularity in the 1930s and 1940s with Hollywood film celebrities and other wealthy clients and helped drive the desert town’s transformation into an oasis for the rich and famous. Mr. Berry was named for his great-uncle, Clarence Jesse Berry, who ventured from his family’s pioneer roots in Selma to strike it rich in the Klondike gold rush of the late 1890s and built an oil empire in the Kern County town of Taft.

Former Fresno Regional Foundation CEO Dan DeSantis said Mr. Bennett, his friend over the last decade, would sometimes obliquely refer to the family’s fortune. “He would say, ‘I’m just lucky. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth — it was golden,’” DeSantis recalled. But, he added, Mr. Bennett eschewed the trappings of wealth in favor of the rustic lifestyle of horseback riding and cattle ranching — and a penchant for low-key contributions to charitable causes, particularly those serving women and children in need.

Mr. Bennett was educated in Claremont and an elite prep school in Connecticut before returning to study photography in Los Angeles, where one of his instructors was the yet-to-become famous nature photographer Ansel Adams. He later graduated with a degree in photojournalism from Stanford University before enlisting in the U.S. Navy in World War II. He served in the Pacific aboard a tank-landing ship and was involved in the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He received the Purple Heart for an injury he suffered at Okinawa.

“After he came back from the war, he didn’t want to go in to journalism because he couldn’t stand that he’d have to be in a city,” Alysa Bennett said. “So he decided to get into cattle.”

Former Bee executive editor Betsy Lumbye, who interviewed Mr. Bennett extensively for a book on the Berry family history in gold and oil, said he studied at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and worked as a ranch hand in California and Wyoming where, he said, he learned “to think like a cow.” When his great-uncle Clarence passed, Mr. Bennett inherited the largest share of his holdings and joined the family business, eventually becoming president and chairman of Berry Holding Co. through a period of expansion and diversification in the 1970s.

In the 1980s, after leaving the day-to-day operations at Berry Holding Co., he bought a 24,000-acre ranch in Arizona and later added a pair of ranches totaling about 2,100 acres in Raymond. “Ranching was his first love. … He was a hell of a cowboy. He would ride any horse you put under him,” said his daughter, Alysa Bennett, who lives in Philadelphia. His first place was up on the Fresno River in the foothills east of Madera, at a site that now lies below the waters of Hensley Lake. “He knew his business and he knew cattle.”

Alysa Bennett recalled that after her parents divorced and she moved to Philadelphia with her mother, she would return to California to spend summers with her father on the ranches. “We really could connect when we were on the ranch,” she said. “He did it big time and he did it hands-on. He’d be out there with a shovel digging out broken pipelines and riding out to look for lost cattle. And he’d whistle and sing off tune.”

In his retirement, he gave each of his three children one of his beloved cattle ranches; to preserve the property, he donated conservation easements over the land to ensure that they are never developed or converted to other uses. “This will not change in a thousand years,” he told the Sierra Star newspaper in 2011. “Think of that. That’s longer than the Roman Empire.”

The ranching lifestyle belied the family fortune that ballooned from an oil boom in the wake of the OPEC oil embargo of the early 1970s. The wealth enabled Mr. Bennett to engage in his second passion: donating to charities aimed at helping people in need. “That’s why I’m still alive, for philanthropic endeavors,” he told Lumbye last year. “There’s nothing like it.”

DeSantis said that when he joined the Fresno Regional Foundation in 2005, his attention was captured by one foundation account with about $1 million that was languishing unspent until he arranged a visit with Mr. Bennett. DeSantis, who now lives in Davis and runs the Yolo Community Foundation, said his first meeting with Mr. Bennett “was the start of a long and fulfilling friendship.”

“He made it clear from the very beginning that he wanted to give money to places putting roofs over people’s heads, clothes on their backs and food in their stomachs,” De Santis said. “I would introduce him to places. We toured the Marjaree Mason Center, and he said let’s send them $100,000. About a month later, we visited the Fresno County Food Bank and then they got $100,000. Over the next few months, he gave over a half million dollars that way.”

DeSantis said that over the next nine years, Mr. Bennett would replenish the Bennett Family Foundation’s fund, “putting in about a million dollars a year and spending just about that much. … And he was always calling me to ask me to come up with more places” to receive money.

Besides the contributions through the foundation, DeSantis and Alysa Bennett talked about Mr. Bennett’s lesser-known charitable acts, including paying for the educations of many of his ranch workers. “He was generous to the core, and I know he gave away in other areas, too,” DeSantis said. “These are the things that set him apart from the many philanthropists that I know.”

This story was originally published June 29, 2015 at 5:52 PM with the headline "Humble rancher-philanthropist Peter Bennett dies at 92."