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Public Servants · the Council, the Clerks, the Chiefs, and the Lines to Indianapolis and Washington
The Government section of this history keeps the mayors — thirty-three of them, whole. But a city is not run by its mayors alone, and for most of South Bend's life it was not even run mainly by them. It was run by the nine members of a Common Council that has sat since the first city election of 5 June 1865; by clerks who kept the paper and, in one clerk's phrase for her office, served as the city's historian and archivist; by controllers who held the purse under two different titles; by marshals, then chiefs, who commanded its police, and by fire chiefs who rose through every rank of their department to its top; and beyond the city limits of the office chart, by the prosecutors and sheriffs of St. Joseph County, the legislators this ground sent to Indianapolis for as long as fifty years at a stretch, and the men and women who carried South Bend's name into Congress and onto the federal bench. This section keeps those people. Some of them are famous in the larger record and are profiled elsewhere in this history — Colfax, DeFrees, Kernan, Walorski — and they appear here only where a succession runs through them. Most are famous nowhere else. They are remembered here the way the record remembers them: for service.
The Common Council: nine seats, a century and a half
1865 – today
The first council: The council was born with the city. At the first city election, on 5 June 1865 — two weeks after the incorporation vote carried 286 to 194 — South Bend's voters chose a mayor and a Common Council together, and…
The council's firsts and long servers
1896 – today
The first woman to hold public office in the city: Before any woman sat on the council, one held city office by the council's own appointment. Catherine Esmay, president of the women-led Progress Club, led the club's campaign for…
John Voorde: forty years an elected official
1945 – 2026
The mayor's son who started in the street department: John Joseph Voorde was born in 1945, the son of Edward F. "Babe" Voorde, the mayor whose death in a car crash on 2 September 1960 — the boy's first day of high school — is…
The clerk's desk: keeper of the record
1991 – today
The office: The city clerk is the second elected officer of the city, behind the mayor alone: keeper of the council's minutes and the city's ordinances, of the municipal code book and the city seal — the office through whose…
The controller's desk: the city's purse
1960 – today
The office under two names: The city's fiscal officer — the official who keeps its accounts, certifies its money and presents its budgets — has served under both of the office's historic titles in this record: comptroller in the…
The appointed machinery: boards, works, and the mayor's staff
The appointed service
Government by board: Beneath the elected offices runs the appointed machinery through which most of the city's daily government actually moves: the Board of Public Works, which lets the contracts, buys and sells the city's real…
Marshals and first chiefs: the police before the modern line
1865 – 1956
The marshal: Before the city had a police department it had a marshal — the principal peace officer of the municipality, an elected working officer rather than a department head. The 1901 city history of Anderson and Cooley names…
The modern police chiefs
1970 – today
Marciniak and the long apprenticeship: The modern succession first stands clear in December 1995, when the Common Council passed Resolution 2312-95 commending Ronald G. Marciniak, chief of police for more than seven years by…
The fire chiefs
1853 – today
The department's own count: The fire department dated itself in 2007 at a hundred and fifty-four years — a founding in 1853 — while Edythe Brown's 1920 table of South Bend firsts gives "1855 — First Fire Department, Volunteer."…
The county prosecutors
1998 – today
The office and the city: The prosecuting attorney of St. Joseph County is a county officer, elected countywide, but the office's work is the city's criminal record: its courtrooms sit in South Bend, and the cases that define eras…
The county sheriffs
1985 – today
The office: The sheriff of St. Joseph County commands the county police, keeps the county jail and serves the county's courts from South Bend. The office's nineteenth- and most of its twentieth-century succession is beyond the…
Beverly Crone and the county's other firsts
1979 – 2017
Thirteen elections, all won: The county's own firsts run through one career, and the council that she started on recorded it whole when she died. Beverly Delores (Munger) Crone, after twenty years in bookkeeping and accounting…
The statehouse line: South Bend in Indianapolis
1840 – today
The first of the line: The city's state service begins with John D. DeFrees — the printer-legislator whose profile stands in the People section — who sat in the Indiana House in 1840 and the Indiana Senate in 1842, the young…
The federal line I: from Colfax to the war generation
1855 – 1959
The seat and its numbers: South Bend's congressional seat has worn three numbers across this record: the Ninth in Colfax's day, the Thirteenth through the early twentieth century, the Third from the 1930s — and since 2003 the…
The federal line II: Brademas to the present holders
1959 – today
Brademas, printed at his boundary: John Brademas was born on 2 March 1927 in Mishawaka and raised in South Bend — the boundary is printed exactly, because the two cities are separate records: Mishawaka holds his birth, South Bend…
Judge Grant and the federal bench
1935 – 1998
One servant, three services: Robert Allen Grant's career runs through three of this section's entries, and is gathered here whole. He was born on 31 July 1905 near Bourbon, Indiana, came to South Bend in 1922, and took his…