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November 22, 2008

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Chris Brammer always thought she and Jeanne Turner would retire about the same time. Brammer, who had been in charge of Lyon County District Court’s traffic division since January 1979, has worked with and for Turner since the latter became clerk of the district court on June 1,1981.

Last month, Turner announced she would retire effective June 13 from her job as head clerk for the Fifth Judicial District. The job has been split into two positions, with additional duties placed into the job descriptions. Brammer will stay on as clerk of the district court, beginning on Monday, and Ruth Wheeler will become court administrator and Brammer’s immediate supervisor.

Though Brammer said she is happy for Turner to enjoy a well-deserved retirement, Brammer had envisioned that both of them would work for quite a few years beyond their state retirement eligibility dates.

“I always figured Jeanne and I may retire about the same time,” Brammer said.

When that became impossible, Brammer’s husband, Gary, and son, Scott, convinced her she was up to the challenge of the clerk’s job.

“I’m going to have a lot to learn,” she said. “I’m excited about learning.”

In the interim, Brammer is training on some of the tasks she knows she will have and looking forward to developing the clerk’s job, as she and Wheeler work together to see which of Turner’s tasks is the best fit for each of their responsibilities.

“Jeanne had made up a job description which mainly fills out what she had been doing,” Brammer said. “She did a really good making out a job description. There really wasn’t anything that was recommended” as belonging to either new job.

But the details provided by Turner will go far in helping both Brammer and Wheeler learn the essential duties that are beyond the obvious tasks.

“The biggest challenge of the job will be to learn everything Jeanne has done in the past 27 years,” Brammer said. “All the staff in the office have been very supportive and I know they will be very helpful making my job easier.”

The goal, Brammer said, is “to continue having the Clerk of the District Court’s office run as professionally and smoothly as Jeanne Turner did over the past 27 years.”

Brammer had come to the court with a good basic understanding of all that happened in the court clerk’s office beyond the traffic division’s boundaries; only the scale of case numbers was different.

She had graduated from Eureka High School and taken a year of business courses at Butler County Community College when a family friend mentioned a job opening in the Greenwood County/Probate Court. She applied and, at 19, got the job as traffic and probate courts clerk under Judge Harriet Schumaul.

“There were only two clerks and the judge in the office,” Brammer said.

Her first day at work remains a vivid memory, both for the excitement of having a real first job and the embarrassment that came before the day ended.

Then, in June 1974, the Kansas Highway Patrol still used aircraft to check for speeders on the highways below. Schumaul agreed to go up in one of the small planes and took the neophyte clerk with her. They were going to learn how cars were clocked by stopwatch to determine speeds.

“When the airplane landed, Chris passed out and ended up in the back seat of a patrol car on the way back to the office,” Brammer said of herself. She’s flown only once since then.

When she married Gary Brammer two years later, the couple moved to Emporia. She applied at the Lyon County Probate Court, then presided over by Magistrate Judge Darrell Meyer, but there were no openings. She took a job as teller at Lyon County State Bank’s drive-thru window until a position opened in district court in January 1979.

She was hired by then-District Judge R.E. Miller and then-Clerk of the District Court Betty Jo Larson, who is the mother of Jeffry J. Larson.

Jeff Larson sometimes came to his mother’s office, both as a high school student and as a young man studying for a law degree. Brammer laughed when she remembered teasing him about when she’d have to start calling him “Mr. Larson.”

The teasing stopped officially in January 2007, when Jeff Larson formally joined the Fifth Judicial District team.

Now, Brammer calls him “Judge” — and rather proudly, too.

In the early days of her 29 years in charge of the traffic division, she worked closely with the late Magistrate Judge Francis Towle, a retired Chase County Sheriff who was well known for his sense of humor privately and for his lack of lenience professionally in cases involving alcohol.

“He was a very special person to me and we had a special friendship with each other,” Brammer said of Towle. “... He was wonderful.”

The traffic court then was a bustling place, and perhaps because of the division’s high case load, Brammer’s section was the first in the clerk’s office to convert its record system to computers.

The number of tickets given by Highway Patrol troopers and sheriff’s deputies has never equaled those peak years of 1980-82.

“Actually, it’s gone down,” Brammer said, mentioning that 8,000 to 10,000 tickets that had been processed annually during that time period, when the sky patrol still operated.

Court costs have gone up, however. In 1982, the cost increased to $19; in 2008, the cost has jumped to $66, in addition to any fines imposed.

“Fines went up, too,” she added, “but not as dramatically as court costs.”

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