The stew was between the two of them. Calling it a story she was “aching to tell,” Baker, who had an earlier career in politics, moved swiftly to present his version first.
“I can’t just waste my day,” Baker began.
In 1993, for the first time fully retired and with time on his hands, he took advantage of some hours while his wife was working at Sears to do some helpful rearranging.
“I sort of went through and organized the kitchen cabinets,” he said. As a seasoned administrator — he was for two decades a principal or assistant principal — he did so thoroughly and responsibly.
“If things were moved,” he said, “I put a little label on the cabinet door.”
Although the colors of the label are lost to history, when Sonia came up the short flight of back steps into the kitchen and saw the cupboards, she saw one color: red.
“I told him to get a job or I’m going to call Eddie Dunn or some other attorney,” said Mrs. Baker, in a voice that brought to mind a force of nature.
When her turn came she recalled one other telling detail of the day: When she arrived, her husband informed her of one other source of Baker household disorder: that two bottles of catsup were open at the same time.
That only caused her to see a yet deeper shade of red.
Fear of flying
Newlyweds Roger and Sonia Baker arrived in Springfield in 1959. They’d met in Orlando, Fla., where Roger had been stationed with the Air Force.
He’d arrived there by way of the ROTC program at Ohio Wesleyan University, where he’d earned a degree in political science and “enough education courses to get my teaching certificate.”
The Delaware, Ohio, campus wasn’t a far journey from his Richland County home.
“The largest town that you would recognize is Mt. Vernon,” he said. “North of that is Fredricktown, and north of that is Butler Village.”
Outside of Butler Village is Ankenytown, which he said is “on a good day about the size of maybe Harmony.”
Baker’s Air Force career was shortened by an unexpected obstacle: a fear of heights.
“Flying was funny with me,” he explained. Sometimes when the engine revved before takeoff, he got the feeling he could take on the world.
“Other times, they’d rev those engines and I’d want to drag my feet.”
His ambivalence was furthered by two other circumstances. The first was his assignment to an early jet with a less than robust safety record.
“That scared the liver out of me,” he said.
The second was a trip with a student pilot who was at the controls somewhere over the Great Lakes and confessed as he was about to refuel in the air that although his nerves could remain steady all day long flying in tight formation, “when they wave that boom at me, they go to hell.”
Moments later, the boom appeared close to Baker’s confined quarters down in the “pit” of the plane, “and my thought was, we’d run into” the refueling plane. After two and a half years of active duty, “they decided they’d give me an early out,” he said. And newly married, he found himself on the ground looking for a job.
First career, two jobs
For his first year in Springfield, he taught at what he still calls Springfield Public High School.
The next year, North High opened, and he stayed put.
“I enjoyed South,” he said. “I was there for 11 years.”
He moved on to become principal at Franklin Junior High for seven years and Roosevelt Junior High for three before returning to South to finish out his career.
Teaching and administration were “two different jobs,” he said.
“I enjoyed them both. But they were two different jobs.”
“I never wanted to go beyond the building level. I wanted to stay where young people were.”
And although he saw more of the troubled young people in his administrative days, he saw most everyone in his teaching days, because he taught a one-semester course in government that was required for graduation.
Even years later when ringing the bell for the Kiwanis Club as it supported the Salvation Army holiday fundraising campaigns, he’d run into former students, some of whom would ask if he was surprised they graduated.
But even a busy school job didn’t keep Baker occupied.
Into politics
Baker was on good terms with Bob Pyle, another affable government teacher in the city schools, when Pyle decided to apply his knowledge of government and run for city commission.
“I was on his committee,” Baker said.
Pyle was elected, “and in the next two years, we talked a lot,” he said.
“We stayed in close touch, and he asked me some time if I’d like to run.
“My sense of it is that Roger wanted to see how politics worked,” said long-time friend Jim Miller.
“His was a government major, and he taught government in high school, so he ran for office.”
Elected on his first run in 1971, he joined a commission with Pyle, Florence Huebner, Max Cordle and Bob Burton in 1972.
One of his earliest moments proved most memorable.
It was the night the commission was to elect a new mayor from its ranks.
Convinced there would be a two-to-two split, with Baker voting for Pyle and she for Burton, Huebner brought two apple pies to the meeting.
“She thought we’d be there all night,” Baker explained.
Baker, who had said he was voting for Burton all along, did so.
“On the first ballot it was all over,” he said.
A plus of the night in addition to the apple pie was the start of a continuing friendship with the man he supported.
A decade as mayor
After two years as a commissioner, Baker started the first of his 10 years as mayor, a job that called on and sharpened his skills and seeking common ground and compromise among people with disparate views.
“Florence (Huebner) had a pecking order,” he said.
Her priorities were things that would support firefighters, police officers, blacks, the poor “and then everyone else,” Baker said.
“I appreciated that. You knew where she was coming from and you adjusted from there. We got along fine,” he said.
To keep things cordial “we always had a rule that there were no surprises during the formal meeting. If you have something going on, bring it up” in the information pre-session so others would be aware of it.
“One attribute Roger has that really served him well in politics,” said Miller, is that “if someone asks Roger a question, he doesn’t just fire back an answer. He sits there, cogitates a moment, then givers an answer. He’s not firing off the hip.”
But one aspect of Baker’s style — an unwillingness to publicly criticize the city staff — combined with his serial election as mayor to work against him.
For one, Baker said, “I found myself doing the same things, answering the same questions. And while I enjoyed it, I just thought 12 years was probably enough.”
When he announced his decision not to run for city commission in 1983, he said it was in part because people looked at him as not so much a representative of the voters as a representative of the city government.
He disagreed with that assessment, but said that some people held that, creating its own political reality.
Office fatigue
If the 12 years in office had begun to wear on Baker himself, it had begun to wear on Sonia earlier.
She might not have been thrilled when it became news that a city commissioner’s wife was having a baby, “but I think the worst part of it for me was when I’d go to the grocery,” she said.
If those who knew her weren’t bringing up a political issue, they would be asking why her husband spanked somebody in school.
“I would get so tired of that. After a while, I would just grin and say ‘Call him and ask him.’”
That was about the time she really wanted to say: “Roger who?”
Her husband, too, ran into overlapping problems.
“I tried very hard to keep city school issues out of politics and politics out of schools,” he said.
But he was not always successful.
Once a Franklin Junior High parent came to the school office to discuss an issue involving his daughter, “then he got into some phase of politics,” Baker said.
When a car accident happened outside the office along Kenwood Avenue, Baker said “I suppose you’re going to blame me for that to,” he recalled.
Said the parent: “That’s what I’m talking about.”
But a turn of circumstances at school ended up sending Baker and his wife back into politics again.
Wanting to stay at the school level and knowing that the only step up was a high school principalship, Baker decided that when that was not in the cards he would make a run for the county commission.
A second commission
He did so in 1986, and in part because of a rift between the UAW Local 402 leadership and incumbent Democratic commissioner Lou Kerrigan, Baker got the union’s endorsement and won the spot.
But a year into his term — in February of 1988 — he was called back to finish out the year at Springfield High School after the then principal, as Baker put it, “left one weekend in January and never came back.”
For the remainder of the school year, “on Tuesdays and Thursdays I would be at the county commission all day, then I would go to the high school Monday, Wednesday and Friday.”
One thing made it a particularly good arrangement for the schools: with teacher evaluations due in March and none done to date, “I knew the staff — who they were and what to look for.”
“We got it done,” he said.
Things didn’t work out so smoothly, however, in his other job.
In 1990, well-established Democratic Commissioner Roger Tackett opposed Baker, and with the full backing of traditional Democrats won by just more than 600 votes — a percentage difference of 50.7 to 49.3 percent.
With that narrow margin of defeat and the backing of the Clark County Republican Party, Baker returned to the commission immediately by accepting a two-year appointment to fill out the term of Merle Grace Kearns, who that fall had won a seat in the Ohio Senate.
But when he was defeated two years later by Democrat Jimmy Sheehan, Baker decided not to run again.
“I had really planned to stay on the county commission a little longer than I did,” Baker said.
On the other hand, Baker told himself “I’m not going to be Springfield’s answer to Harold Stassen.”
(Students of politics will know Stassen as a Republican U.S. senator from Minnesota who ran unsuccessfully for his party’s presidential nomination a whopping 11 times.)
So Baker ended his political career.
Set adrift
“Just him cleaning out his office at the county building was very sad,” said the Bakers’ only daughter and middle child, Nancy Baker-Doyle. “I’d never seen him have to leave something he loved so much.”
Part of it was the politics, she said.
But part of it too was the absence of activity and involvement that came with his retirement.
“This is somebody who would come home (from school) and eat at 5 o’clock and leave at 6 o’clock” for one meeting or another, she said.
“He was going, going, going, and it stopped. He got quiet. It just wasn’t Dad without him working.”
Her father had a sense of that, too.
That eventually gave way to his rearranging the kitchen cupboards, discovering the two working bottles of catsup and one memorable stew.
What to do?
Baker said he found it frustrating to be in that spot.
“I was retired from the school system, so I have a decent retirement plan. It wasn’t a matter of how can I feed the family. It was what in the world am I going to do that’s satisfying, productive and keeps me involved in things” — the other things that working provides.
“It just had to be something I could do.”
At 58, which he was at the time, “you’re too young to go sit in a chair and do nothing and too old to be considered for a lot of other things,” he said.
Baker said he’d seen retired teacher Jim Walsh make a successful transition into real estate, so took classes that, at that time, were briefly offered locally, and signed up with Goodrich and Vereen, where he found the staff “extremely helpful and always nice.”
Judy Capelli, at that time broker/owner of the firm, called Baker “a very fine gentleman to work with” and still considers him “a great friend and a great guy.”
When Baker soon became involved in the Springfield Board of Realtors, she also saw some of his political skills come into play — skills that led him to be twice elected as the organization’s president.
“Sometimes we had very diverse opinions and thoughts as what to do” with issues before the board, she said.
“He just seemed to meld everybody together and brought them to common ground.”
Baker downplays the status of the office.
“You’ve got to keep in mind that, first of all they’ve got to find someone that’s willing to do it and someone they suspect won’t screw things up badly.”
Miller disagrees, seeing the progression as natural.
“Ever since he became a principal, he’s been in a position of responsibility.”
Baker says the degree of diplomacy that works on boards also is helpful in working with homeowners, some of whom are convinced they’re living in mansions that should bring a commensurate price.
Like children who are near and dear to them, homeowners also react differently to suggestions that modest improvements be made to the homes they’ve lived in for years to make them more attractive to others.
Baker said the work essentially involves educating homeowners about the market and what to expect, something a retired educator has some experience in.
That Baker was able to transfer the skills from his education and political career to his real estate career was no surprise to long time friend and former Springfield City Schools superintendent Tom Payton.
First, “Roger is a very hard worker,” said Payton. “He has to be busy all the time.”
Second, “he’s always gotten along well with people.”
Third, said Payton. “He’s very analytical,” a tool helpful in getting from one place or career to another.
‘A brief blur’
If Baker was — as friend Miller puts it — “a bit lost” after his political career ended, he’s continued on well.
While Baker said his dozen years as mayor “seemed like a long time,” his 17 years in real estate has been “a brief blur” — one that’s been a more pleasant time than the brief stew in the kitchen that set him on the path.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368.
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