The clinking of plates and forks is background noise and is as commonplace as the proverbial “rubber chicken” at the conference of your career.

Friday afternoon, the clinking of forks and knives quickly hushed as a 90-year-old man stepped up to the podium to talk.

Normally, during such after-lunch convention speeches, quiet whisper conversations begin at tables in the back and more than a few folks slyly remove their phones from their pockets to check email, Facebook and all of the other “must have” parts of American life these days.

But something was different in what the quiet, unassuming man at the microphone had to say.

The makeup of the audience made the nearly silent room even more astonishing. The room was filled with newspaper editors and publishers.

The group is by their very nature, a bit skeptical of most things.

Journalism professors teach budding journalists to verify everything.

“If your mother tells you that she loves you, you’d better verify it,” goes the professorial logic.

To impress a roomful of journalists is difficult, usually. They often have a wry skepticism about everything in the world.

So as Morley Piper began to talk, it wasn’t the man’s 45-year career as executive director of the New England Newspaper Association that was so riveting.

Nor was the subject his time working at the Boston Globe.

It wasn’t how important he saw the role of the daily newspaper in our society, fond memories of the newspaper industry from years ago or any other of the likely countless life experiences that anyone who lives to be 90 most certainly possesses.

Piper’s lunch discussion, which served as the keynote speech for the opening of a combined convention of Mississippi and Louisiana press associations, was about a single day in his life — June 6, 1944.

Piper is an increasingly rare American. He is a survivor of the D-Day Invasion on Omaha Beach in Normandy France during World War II.

That makes him not only rare, but also among a select few people who are truly American heroes.

Piper humbly recounted the scenes he saw with his unit, the 29th Infantry Division on D-Day.

He described their lowering themselves down rope ladders from troop transport ships and onto the landing crafts that would deposit them into what most of us would consider the closest thing to hell on earth we could ever imagine.

Piper said they all knew it would be “dreadful,” but later said most of the men on the beach that day didn’t think they would make it out alive, being gripped by “the cold fingers of fear.”

Piper’s unit of 43 men sustained enormous casualties — only 17 men survived the invasion.

Listening to Piper deliver his personal story was humbling, but also history. As a friend said, “This may be the last time any of us gets to hear from someone like him first-hand.”

Time is catching up with World War II veterans at an alarming rate. Just a couple of months ago, Natchez lost World War II veteran Noland Biglane.

Piper said, humbly, that his role on D-Day was a small one, but said he was fortunate enough to have been “in the company of some brave men” that day.

And a grizzled bunch of newspaper editors stood awestruck by Piper’s own humble bravery and service to our country and collectively knew they were in the company of a truly brave man.

When Piper finished, the silence stopped as the audience leapt to its feet in a long, rousing standing ovation.

It was a miniscule way of saying thank you to a man who enlisted in the Army to fight in World War II and has lived with the memories of war each and every day since.

Kevin Cooper is publisher of The Natchez Democrat. He can be reached at 601-445-3539 or kevin.cooper@natchezdemocrat.com.