Geoffrey Matthew Thornett (1898-1974)

Geoffrey spent 27 years as the Secretary to the Commissioners of Washington, DC, a position also known as the Secretary of the District of Columbia. He had the longest tenure of anyone to hold the position, which dates back to 1871, as listed here. This was an era when the DC government was very different from today, as I describe farther below. Beyond his role as Secretary, he also held other governmental roles in DC, including being head of the DC Personnel Board from 1940 to 1964 and a member of DC's Armory Board and Recreation Board. Apparently back then it was cool to have a low-digit license plate in DC, and Geoffrey's license plate number was 9. When he was young he worked for a railroad, and got started working in the DC government in the auditing department in 1927, just before the Great Depression.

Geoffrey and his family were Catholic, and he was a member of several Catholic organizations, including the Knights of Columbus, of which he was a fourth-degree member, and the John Carroll Society.

As a sophomore on the 1915 Eastern High School (DC) city championship baseball team, Geoffrey played second base. His older brother, Richard "Luggy" Thornett, was a pitcher also Eastern High's quarterback. Richard later became a policeman. My dad is named after him, and he gave my dad a catcher's mitt when he was born.

While working full time, Geoffrey got a bachelor's degree in accounting at Benjamin Franklin University in DC (which later merged with George Washington University). This school was specifically geared toward working adults. Later, in midlife, he got a law degree in 1940 from National University School of Law (which later merged with George Washington University Law School).

During Geoffrey's time working in the DC government, the city was not governed democratically like it is today. As a federal district, it was run by a Board of Commissioners made up of three people who were not elected by citizens but appointed by the President of the United States for six-year terms. The city's budget had to be approved by the US Congress. Generally, two of the three commissioners would be civilians and one would be a member of the US Army Corps of Engineers. The commissioners' terms were staggered, with one replaced every two years, making Geoffrey's three decades as Secretary a "continuity factor" that lent stability to the DC government.

Stability was important during Geoffrey's time as secretary, because there were many tumultuous events in this era. For example, just two years after he became Secretary, World War 2 broke out, and DC soon became the center of the Allied command. During the war, the population of DC nearly doubled, which created extreme housing shortages, sanitation crises, and overloaded public transportation, all of which the commissioners had to manage. And in the 1950s and 1960s, DC was a central hub of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1957, it became the first major US city to have a black majority. And in 1963, the year before Geoffrey retired, Martin Luther King, Jr. led the March on Washington on the National Mall in DC and gave his "I Have a Dream" speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, about eight blocks from the District Building (now the John A. Wilson building) where Geoffrey worked.