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RESOLUTION NO. 78-114 A RESOLUTION OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF SANTA ANA PROCLAIMING SEPTEMBER 15, 1978 AS "CLERK OF THE COUNCIL DAY" WHEREAS, WHEREAS, WHEREAS, WHEREAS, WHEREAS, WHEREAS, WHEREAS, WHEREAS, the municipal clerk, along with the tax collector, is the oldest of public servants; the office can be traced to biblical times and even before; and St. Paul and his followers during his missionary work in Persia owed their safety to the action of a town clerk; as related in Acts XIX, 23-25, the artisans of Ephesus who made the idols of the time feared the effect of Paul's missionary work on their trade; they incited a mob to seize two of Paul's followers; the town clerk, however, spoke out against this action and insisted that charges laid against these men had to be settled in the proper manner and before the proper authorities, there was no justification for riotous conduct, and with that he dispersed the crowd; and ancient Greece had a city secretary who read of- ficial documents publicly; at the opening of a meeting, one of his duties was to read a curse upon anyone who should seek to deceive the people; and the early keepers of the archives were often called remembrancers, and before writing came into use, their memory was the public record; and the title as we know it is derived from the Middle Ages; a "Clerk? was any member of a religious order, a "cleric" or ,'clergyman"; and since, for all prac- tical purposes, the scholarship of the Middle Ages was limited to the clergy, the name "clerk" came to be synonymous with "scholar"; and the Office of Clerk can be traced back to the year 1272 A.D. in the History of the Corporation of Old London; in the 1500's in England there was not only the "Towne Clarcke" but also the Clerc Comtroller of the King's Honorable Household"; in 1603, there was a "Clarke General of the Armie"; King Henry the Eighth had a Clarke of the Spicery" and King Charles had his "Clerk of the Robes"; and when the early colonists came to America, they set up forms of local government to which they had been accustomed, and the office of clerk was one of the first established; the colony at Plymouth appointed a person to act as recorder; and over the 200 years since the birthday of the United States of America, municipal clerks have become the hub of government, the direct link between the in- habitants of their towns and their government; the clerk is the historian of the community, for the en- tire recorded history of the town and its people is in the care of the clerk; and