Neither Ezra nor Ruth Baker got within shouting distance of a high school diploma.

“They had to quit school and to go out and work and help survive,” said their son Robert.

Because of that, “they encouraged us to get a diploma,” added Baker, who recently gathered with five other members of the Olive Branch High School Class of 1942 to celebrate.

Seventy years after commencement, work and schoolwork run together for Baker, as for most of them.

Up at 5 a.m., “We had to go help feed the cattle and the hogs, then come in, change clothes, go to school, and come home and do the same thing again,” Baker said. “As a boy, you didn’t like to get up and do anything, but that was part of growing up”

Baker said the steam-powered threshers from his early days near Troy had become gasoline-powered machinery by the time his father rented land on New Carlisle Pike.

The workers, on the other hand, always ran on the same massive amounts of home-cooked food.

“Some of those dinners we ate, I don’t know how we worked in the afternoon,” Baker said.

As summer turned to fall, “we cut corn by hand, shucked it by hand scooped it off the wagon. Everything was by hand.”

Baker treasures the 1935 John Deere tractor he and his grandson use to tow an antique airplane each year in New Carlisle’s Heritage of Flight Parade. It’s the kind of tractor his father used when Baker was a child.

And he’s seen farming change almost as much as flight.

Said Baker, “They do now in an hour what took us all season.”

The last of 12

Lois Burns Hupman started her school days at the little round schoolhouse at Olive Branch and finished at the high school a few steps away.

But in between she migrated.

“When they got enough students at Olive Branch, then I had to go to Medway. Then when they got too many at Medway, I went back to Olive Branch.”

The youngest of 12 children, Hupman was adaptable to most change because she had “a lot of bosses.”

Paired with the raft of cousins and even nieces and nephews, they helped to create what she calls “the happiest childhood anybody ever had.”

She was busy baking, sewing and cooking at home. But one of her favorite childhood memories is rescuing the runt pig of a litter. Quashing her father’s plan to kill it, she cared for the runt, warming it near the kitchen oven, and raised it until it was no longer a runt at 150 pounds.

After Olive Branch, Hupman graduated to new kinds of work. First, she worked out of tents at Wright and Patterson fields, then found herself married and raising her own children when work called again.

Her husband, who ran a gravel hauling business, found himself short a driver and long a customer one day when Hupman volunteered to get behind the wheel.

She drove right on from there.

“I think women ought to learn to do different things,” she said. “Anyway, that’s my life” — a life so full and satisfying she says, “I’m ready to go home any time.”

‘Rough as a cob’

Mary Hannaberry is one of a slew of teachers Mary Ruth Bowser Menda can recall from her earliest days at Possum School.

“She told me my face wasn’t too pretty to smack,” Menda recalled. “I figure she told me the truth.”

By grades 7-9 , “I was paying more attention to the boys (which) may have a bearing on the fact that I don’t remember some of the teachers” at Rockway School, Menda said.

But Olive Branch High School Principal Lawrence Pflaummer was unforgettable.

“Now when that man walked into the room, you wanted to settle down and do your work. I mean he was a rough cob and we respected him.”

Menda said she was “one of the poor kids” from Rockway who went to Olive Branch rather than Springfield High because Olive Branch provided transportation.

And she remembers, too, a division at Olive Branch between the students from Rockway and New Carlisle.

“There was a line,” she said, one she’d never felt with the children at the Ohio Masonic Home that were her classmates at Rockway and playmates during the summer.

Even in the face of divisions, however, there were some lines no one crossed.

“You know, that’s the secret of the whole world getting along. Even if you’re dead right, let the situation cool off and everything will be all right,” Menda said.

Truck farm girl

Mildred Tyree Banks was among the first students to attend Donnelsville School, which also sent students to Olive Branch.

She even knew the bigger town of Springfield by the time she went to high school.

Her father, Cliff, worked at the Big Four Railway Express, but to make ends meet, she said, “we were what was called truck farmers.”

“It was basically we had a cow, a horse, chickens, and we grew vegetables and things like that.”

“We would go door-to-door in Springfield, selling pears, grapes and all kinds of berries,” she said. “And if the hens were doing their jobs, we sold eggs, too.”

Raw milk was dipped for customers out of a metal can, and cream was, as the saying goes, the cream of the crop.

“It sold for a lot more money,” she said.

Ridiculed by some today, lard was a key ingredient in making her mother’s breads and pies so popular.

Whether working in the kitchen, pulling weeds or knocking bugs off potatoes and into a can of turpentine, she and her siblings were busy, though not nearly as busy as their mother.

Rebecca Tyree cleaned houses and looked after the sick when she wasn’t baking or working around the farm, using skills and a work ethic learned as a child at the Clark County Children’s Home when it was a working farm.

Maybe because she arrived at Olive Branch with discipline, Hanks’ memories are of a softer side of Principal Pflaummer.

After Pflaummer learned of Hanks’ trouble with math, he guided her into subjects in which she could succeed.

Perhaps more importantly, he was there to keep her from falling to pieces when her senior picture day was turning bad.

Told the class wouldn’t travel to Dayton for pictures if it snowed, she saw flakes in the air, wore her plain blue sweater and blue ribbon, and went to the Pflaummer in tears when she heard they were going anyway.

“What you’ve got on is beautiful,” she remembers him saying. “Go borrow a locket from somebody.”

She did, “and it came out beautiful,” she said.

Whether being rough as a cob or gentle as a lamb, Pflaummer had at least one thing in common with work for the Olive Branch Class of 1942: He was a constant presence.