by Sue Fruchtbaum

The meetings of the Buffalo Board of Education won't be quite the same next month.

Miss Anne E. Cullinan who has been taking the board's minutes for 31 years is retiring at the end of June.

The calm, soft-spoken Miss Cullinan has worked with five school superintendents, one acting superintendent and more than 40 different board members. She has enjoyed it, she says, and recalls with a smile she got the job quite by accident.

After two years work in an appointive job in the Corporation Council's office, Miss Cullinan took a Civil Service examination and became a clerk in the newly opened Riverside High School late in 1929.

Sessions were Heated

When the school closed for the summer she was transferred for the two months to the school department offices in the Genesee Building.

The late James Storer, secretary to the board, had been in an accident and his secretary recently had undergone an operation.

One after another, the summer replacements sent to take notes at the stormy board meetings burst into tears or found they were unable to keep up. Anne Cullinan's competence and poise made her master of the situation and she's been at the job ever since.

Sessions Relatively Calm Now

"Board meetings used to start in the morning as they do now but they were so long that board members would go out to lunch, come back and stay at it until 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon," Miss Cullinan recalls.

Meetings now, she adds, are relatively calm and are much better attended by visitors than those of the 30s.

Miss Cullinan's title has always been assistant secretary to the Board of Education, although the board has had no secretary for about ten years.

"The new teachers seem to look younger and younger--and so many more of them are men nowadays than used to be the case," she says.

To Be Honored at Luncheon

Miss Cullinan, a native of Buffalo, is a graduate of School 27 and old Central High School.

She was secretary to the late Judge Daniel J. Kenefick when he was working on the City Charter revision and became director of stenographic work on that project.

It was while on that work that she became acquainted with Corporation Counsel Gregory Harmon, and started 33 years of work in City Hall.

Miss Cullinan, who lives at 95 Hodge Ave., will be honored by more than 100 School Department employes at a luncheon in the Park Lane June 20.