The Man Who Says ‘Alderman’

SOMERVILLE — John Long is the clerk for the City of Somerville. It is his job to stand to the right of the president of the Board of Aldermen and read agenda items into the official record.

Long has held this position for 17 years. This made him the second-longest-tenured public servant in the room during the February 8 Board of Aldermen meeting at Somerville City Hall.

“You never know if you’ve seen it all until you have seen it all,” Long says. “I wouldn’t say that I’ve seen it all because I don’t know what I haven’t seen.”

Last Thursday, he saw the retirement of two long-time city police officers, a three-song set performed by seven small members of East Somerville Community School Marimba Club, and the approval of 43 orders and resolutions during a three-hour public meeting that then moved to a one-hour closed-door executive session.

“It’s always a good time,” Long said sincerely. “Could have gone all night.”

It is Long’s voice that gives pace and distinctive tone to every Board of Aldermen meeting. He is usually “Mister Clerk” in aldermen-speak, occasionally “our friend Mr. Long.”

As Long read orders, resolutions, and the rest aloud on Thursday, he estimated that he used the word “alderman” “maybe a hundred times.” This is probably a conservative estimate.

As the official voice of the agenda and record, Long says that word more than anyone else in the chambers. In fact, Long may use the word “alderman” more than any other living person in Massachusetts today.

For outside the Somerville Aldermanic Chambers, the word is disappearing. In 1909, Boston dropped their Board of Aldermen and switched to City Council; as did neighboring Cambridge (1911), Chelsea (1995), Everett (2011), and, most recently, Newton (2015).

“I think Melrose still has a Board of Aldermen,” Long says. So the record may be down to Long and Melrose City Clerk Mary-Rita O’Shea.

“Well, well, well,” O’Shea said on Friday. Like Long, O’Shea has been a city clerk for 17 years, although she will retire this spring.

In Somerville, all the alderman-ing may be about to stop.

In his twentieth year as an alderman, Bill White proposed official name changes — from Somerville Board of Aldermen to City Council, from aldermen to city councilors.

The current name, White argued, fails to reflect the composition of the board, which includes three women and several young men. The original moniker, White said, “means elder man.”

“It isn’t like the first settler was named Frank Alderman and we decided to name our municipal board after the first settler of Somerville, or anything like that,” White said. “We took it lock, stock, and barrel from England. England has gotten rid of it, and everyone else pretty much has. So, for me, I think the time has come.”

Since the first elected Somerville government in 1872, there have been aldermen. Elsewhere in Massachusetts, the early-twentieth-century wave of name changes had nothing to do with what Somerville Board President Katjana Ballantyne calls a “gender equity lens,” but, rather, with a state-wide transition from the originally chartered bicameral to unicameral city government.

By the time the first woman, Florence Lee Whitman, was elected to the city government in Cambridge in 1925, for example, she was already joining a City Council.

“First, just want to thank Alderman White for bringing this forward and sticking your neck out and doing this,” Alderman Stephanie Hirsch responded. “It means a lot to me for the elder man . . . to take action on it.”

Having discussed the possible change with constituents, however, Hirsch was concerned about taking unilateral action.

“Some people felt that there was so much change and the change was so fast,” Hirsch said. “For some people it made them feel really unhappy. The responses kind of ranged from super, super angry to ‘I love Somerville, I love the community, but I just don’t feel welcome here and I don’t feel like I belong anymore.’”

Calling for a public forum, she said, “If it’s important enough to change the name, it’s important enough to have a discussion.”

After receiving the most extensive debate of the evening — the issue was returned to twice — the name change was not approved.

At the crux of the issue is the city-wide conflict between old and new Somerville. Tensions have intensified with the influx of new, wealthier residents, and as the city has become more expensive. From 2000 to 2016, median home price increased by 13 percent — to $512,500; median monthly rental price in the same period rose by 23 percent, to $1,600. The naming of Somerville’s city government could become a flashpoint in the struggle to hold on to a vanishing community.

This past summer, Melrose Clerk O’Shea had watched her aldermen debate a similar name change, and now wanted to know how officials were leaning in Somerville. In Melrose, “it was kind of a hot issue,” O’Shea recalls. In the end, the Melrose Board of Aldermen decided to preserve their original name “for historical purposes,” she said.

When I talked to Clerk Long, he considered a possible Somerville name change carefully. “I don’t attach any emotional weight to the title,” he told me. “I mean, it’s just what I read. Seriously, I’m truly agnostic to it. You know?”