Mishawaka Public Servants: The Clerks, the Chiefs, the Councils, and the Lines Out of the City

Public Servants · The Clerks, the Chiefs, the Councils, and the Lines Out of the City

The Government section of this history keeps the mayors and the frame they sat in. But Mishawaka was not run by its mayors alone, and for long stretches it was barely run by them at all. It was run by a clerk who kept the paper for year after year while mayors came and went; by a treasurer whose name stands in every city roster Howard prints; by a city electrician who was still superintending the municipal light plant forty-two years after the first directory names him; by a sealer of weights and measures who held his small desk across thirty-five years of directories; by police chiefs and fire chiefs whose tenures the departments' own file could not close and the directories now anchor; by school superintendents who served a generation each and left their surnames on the school map; and, at the federal desk that touched every household, by the postmasters. Beyond the city limits of the office chart it was served by a township trustee who ran poor relief from an office on Lincolnway, by a police chief who crossed the river of jurisdiction to become the county's sheriff, and by the men who carried this ground to the statehouse and to Congress — one of them born here, in a restaurateur's family, who rose to be majority whip of the United States House. This section keeps those people. Where the record gives a servant whole — how he came in, what he did at the desk, how he left it — he is carried whole. Where it gives only a name in a roster, the name is printed in its roster and the silence around it is named as a gap, with the record that would fill it. No name has been supplied that a source does not carry.