Grace Miller Bennett was an independent woman. She was born January 3, 1918, to Theodore B. and Mary Grunert Miller in Richmond, Indiana. She died March 6, 2018, at age 100 in San Antonio. During World War II, she managed to get herself stranded in Miami while visiting a friend. She went to work at the Naval Air Station there and met William Francis Bennett III, an Air Force second lieutenant, who was in basic training. They married November 3, 1945, at the Army Air Base in Victoria, Texas.
She and Bill raised four children while traveling from one end of the United States to the other during his Air Force career. They retired in San Antonio and Grace, whose ancestry was German, became an adopted Irishwoman as they traveled multiple times to Bill’s ancestral home in County Cork, Ireland. She was a proud member of the San Antonio Irish Cultural Society and continued to travel to Ireland with her children after Bill’s death.
Grace fulfilled a lifelong dream when she traveled to Paris with one of her daughters. She found herself wandering the Left Bank and saying, “I can’t believe I’m actually here.”
She was a talented painter and an avid reader. She loved gardening and had an amazing “green thumb.” She enjoyed watching the birds at the feeders and birdhouses she put in her back yard. In her later years, she began volunteering at the Leon Valley Library and was such an asset to them that they gave her a paying job despite the fact that she really didn’t want to “work.” She volunteered at the Helotes Senior Center and led an exercise class for seniors at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church under the auspices of the YMCA into her mid-80s.
She was preceded in death by her husband, William Francis Bennett III, and is survived by her four children, Jane Ellen Bennett, Oberlin, OH; Ann Bennett Robinson and spouse James Lewis Robinson, San Antonio; William Francis Bennett IV, Los Angeles, CA, and Katherine Ellen Bennett, Santa Monica, CA. She is also survived by two grandchildren, Emily Elizabeth Robinson, San Antonio; and Daniel Patrick Robinson, Kerrville, and by two great-grandchildren.
