The man who was the California Assembly’s first time employee will be honored on the Assembly floor on Tuesday, five months after his family donated boxes full of historical items to the Assembly documenting Arthur Ohnimus’ 45 years in the Legislature’s lower house.
His descendants will be recognized on the Assembly floor on Tuesday and will be presented with a resolution authored by Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez.
Among those expected to attend the ceremony are those who served during his tenure, including William Bagley, Mervyn Dymally, John T. Knox, Bob Monagan and Jerome Waldie.
Ohnimus first started working in the state Assembly in 1915, where he served alongside fellow Assembly clerks Arthur Samish, who rose to become the most powerful lobbyist in the state, and Earl Warren, the future California governor and U.S. Supreme Court chief justice.
In January 1923, Ohnimus was elected chief clerk of the Assembly, a position he held – with a brief hiatus from 1937 to 1940 – for 40 years. From 1957 to 1963 he also served as chief administrative officer of the Assembly Rules Committee. (The job of CAO was created by Proposition 14, passed in 1956, when allowed the hiring of full-time staff. Ohnimus was the first hire.)
Ohnimus died in 1965, but after his wife Bernice, twenty years his junior, died in 2007, the Ohnimus family donated eight boxes of political and legislative documents to the chief clerk’s office.
Those items contain correspondence to and from Ohnimus with everyone from J. Edgar Hoover to Caspar Weinbegrer.
It even includes some original Ohnimus poetry:
The Violet
Buried in foliage green,
The sweetest flowers are seldom seen,
Hidden far from human sight,
They live their simple, perfumed life.
Rarely seen, even by the prying sunbeam
They bud alone, in solitude they fade unseen.
A special exhibit of the Ohnimus collection will be on display in Room 105 of the Capitol this week. A link to the collection is expected to be posted on the Assembly and the chief clerk’s Web sites.
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