All my life I remember my Dad, Johnie Baxter, telling the story of how he and several of his classmates from the small farming community Bumcomb school traveled about 20 miles to the county seat of Riply County, Doniphan, Missouri, to be awarded his graduation diploma from the 8th grade.

And then in October of 2009 while I was doing some family geneology research at the library in Corning, Arkansas, I came across a booklet which contained copies of these pages from the program which included my Dad's name listed among those being honored on May 16, 1935.
           
Even though his name was misspelled — the ending of his first name was left off, his proper first name is J-O-H-N-I-E, and his middle name should have been E-L-V-I-N without the ending S — there it was in black and white.

Shown here on this web page are the cover of that program (to the right), the listing of the program events (below), and the whole page which has the "Rural Class Roll" with the names of all the students from the various parts of Ripley County who were graduating from the eighth grade that year (bottom right).

I was so glad to find this substantiating evidence in support of his memories of that day, even though at the time I found it and just a few days later was able to show these images of it to him on my computer screen his alzheimer's disease was fairly far advanced ... robbing him of most of his memories of his own life story.