“Judicial nominations used to generate about as much excitement as a convention of notaries public.”–Chicago Tribune, May 19, 2005
The National Notary Association 2005 Conference, held at Bally’s Las Vegas last month, started out as one big hullabaloo, out by the palm tree-lined pool, where couples danced to a mariachi band, shoeless women in jumbo, ball-fringed sombreros shook their notarial booties, and some people had more than a couple of cocktails, if you know what I mean.
“Wow,” I said to Ray Zalpa, a notary and accountant in from Fresno, who was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. “I’d heard there was nothing more boring than a bunch of notaries.”
“Look, we can be quite serious,” he said, not seeming to mind the crack at his expense. But the stereotypes, Zalpa said, are simply not reliable. “There’s no way to know who’s a notary. You might be one, for all I know,” he added, somewhat cryptically.
But he was right. In the smoke-scented casino I tried identifying notaries — secretly hoping to find a few of them slumped over the slots or losing their shirts at the roulette wheel — to no avail. They were either (a) deliberately trying to blend in with the crowd, like secret agents, or (b) already in bed asleep, even though it was only 9:30 p.m.
Either way, it’s all just part of their cover: The more boring the world thinks notaries are, the more benign they seem, the easier it is for them to do their jobs. And that job — in addition to witnessing the signing of important documents and administering oaths, as public servants appointed by their respective state governments — is to protect the world.
“You as a notary must be able to do two things,” NNA executive director Timothy S. Reiniger told some of the 2,000 notaries the next morning at the Kick-Off Breakfast, a quite formal event held under blazing chandeliers in the hotel’s Platinum and Gold Room. “First, admit that evil exists and, second, do not fear it.”
Here, in this makeshift sanctum, with NNA employees stationed at the door to screen for intruders, these notaries threw off the mild-mannered personas and revealed themselves to be as conscientious as conventional crime-stoppers and as serious as judges.
In fact, the conference keynote speaker actually was a judge — the chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court — who was on the scene, according to Reiniger, to tell the notaries “how important you have become and increasingly will be in the war against terror.”
Like a lot of civilians, I had thought being a notary meant you watched someone sign a legal document, stamped it with your little seal, collected a few bucks then went back to your real job without giving the whole encounter a second thought.
The current NNA president, Milt Valera, noted in his own rousing speech that “several of the 9/11 hijackers duped a less than conscientious notary into helping them acquire false identity papers.” Also, he added, “FBI Director Robert Mueller recently acknowledged before Congress that notaries and the NNA were trusted allies in their campaign against ID theft.”
Yikes. To hear it from the NNA that morning, terrorism, e-fraud, the mortgage fraud epidemic, immigration fraud, identity theft and other growing crises of national and global import have thrust the nation’s 4.5 million notaries to the front lines in the war against crime.
“Where each of you gets this understanding and courage, we do not know,” Reiniger said.
Later, as I wandered through the Grand Salon — where the notaries gathered to schmooze or to order such notary specific essentials as an inkless thumb printer ($8.05), a shiny new Elite Stamp Notary Seal ($22.45), a book titled “12 Steps to Flawless Notarization” ($8.95) or a T-shirt that says “You’re Notarized!” ($14.95) — I wondered the very same thing.
Who are these people, and why do they do it? What makes these unconventional crime-stoppers continue in the face of danger?
“They are concerned with protecting themselves and other citizens,” said Nancy Worley, a notary and also Alabama’s secretary of state, in a lilting Southern accent. “Their caring about honesty is very apparent.”
Worley — who had taken in David Copperfield’s magic show the night before, had tickets the next night for Andy Williams, but had no plans to see Cirque du Soleil (“I’ve seen about all of that I want to”) — was in town to learn as much as she could from the NNA’s wide array of educational sessions, to help raise the level of notarial practices in her home state. Quite a few other state officials had shown up for the same reason.
“Alabama probably has the worst notary laws in the country,” Worley said. “And almost anybody can sign up to become a notary. It’s always dangerous when people have a title and don’t know what to do with it.”
Carol Salter, a hospital administrative office coordinator from Denver, was probably the best example of the kind of selfless caring notary Worley mentioned. She was awarded a tremendous silver cup earlier that morning, as the 2005 Notary of the Year. “It was a huge honor,” she said. “But I’m like any other notary sitting in these chairs — they’re all doing stellar work in their own way.”
She was recognized for strides in educating other notaries, which is important, she pointed out, because often, by the time people make it with their documents to a notary — for, say, a divorce or a deed transfer — “they want it as quickly and as painlessly as possible. Notaries who don’t have an education will fall into that trap. They feel rushed, and notarize something incorrectly, especially if they don’t know exactly what they’re doing.”
On the house
Salter, who claimed she had no plans to gamble or to see Cirque du Soleil’s “Mystere” at Treasure Island that night with all the other conventioneers, told me she did not charge for her services. Not a cent. Which is par for the course for quite a few notaries, who often get commissioned as a convenience for their businesses or employers.
And in the past — back when notaries were considered “out-of-date bureaucrats mired in the backwaters of government,” as the NNA’s president himself, Milt Valera, put it, that wouldn’t have seemed like such a terribly selfless act. Because, really, how much could a notary possibly make? Especially since standard legal fees (for acknowledgements, jurats, oaths and affirmations) range from a mere twenty cents to $10 nationwide.
But the biggest surprise I got at the NNA conference was that these mild-mannered mercenaries can actually make some serious coin, by specializing as notary signing agents, an area dealing largely in home-loan documents. Especially in California, where the real-estate market is kabooming. At one Notary Signing Agents Skills session, I heard a panelist brag about how a person could command $115,000 a year practicing this particular branch of the notarial arts (by charging $100 or more beyond the negligible per-notarization fee, for additional services like travel, couriering documents, assisting with non-notarized documents, etc.).
“I happen to work in an area where I can do one signing on my lunch hour, and one in the morning, at 7:30 or so,” she said. “After work I’ll do three, and make five or six hundred a day — that’s on a part-time basis. What do you think about that?”
In response, there was a lot of giddy applause from the crowd — a crowd, I noticed, that was much much bigger than the one that had shown up for the charming, professorial slide-show talk I’d attended on the history of the seal, from its earliest Mesopotamian and Chinese roots to the present.
So, I quickly learned, some notaries do have a few selfish concerns, if making money can be considered selfish. What most of them really wanted, in fact, was a second career that let them schedule their own day.
One person who fell under that category, Rhonda Banks, had been driving a bus in Orange County, Calif., for the last 23 years, and was looking for something to do after she retires. She had only recently become a notary.
“I hear there are new opportunities,” she told me. That’s why I came.” She brought her daughter, a waitress and psychology student, along too. “I said, `You may as well have one more thing.'”
Looking ahead
In the notary business, the thing to do is to keep looking to the future, according to a hip looking pair of fortysomething siblings from Teaneck, N.J., Pamela and Maurice Anderson. I told them they seemed too cool to be at a notary convention , and they both laughed and laughed.
“No, no. You just have to be open to earning money. You can’t get locked into what’s old and what’s new, said Pamela, who also works in marketing.” “They’re telling us about new areas of opportunity–like electronic document signing, immigration,” said her brother Maurice. “And it seems that rather than slowing down, things are going to continue growing and branching out.” Which is one reason it’s handy to have the NNA on your side.
“Everything used to be channeled through attorneys,” added Pamela. “But [the NNA] is looking at the regulations and rules in various areas, and saying, `Just because this is something an attorney typically does, it is also something that is legal for a notary to do.'”
Candace Feldt, a licensed real estate agent from Valencia, Calif., who instead now works as a full-time notary signing agent, couldn’t agree more. “In California, you may as well hire us because we’re a lot cheaper than a lawyer,” she said, while socializing between sessions with her friend and fellow signing agent Carole Tillisch.
Both women seemed pretty laid back about this relatively new career path. But in Feldt, I’d finally met one notary who’d had it with the jokes — not to mention the lack of respect and federal regulation. “It’s a high responsibility!” she said, as Tillisch nodded. “To get the FBI involved means that we’re actually going to be acknowledged as an inviolable entity for the security of this country, but I’d like to see notaries be nationalized and make sure our education is straight across the board, too.”
I tried to ask a question, but she was on a roll.
“Seriously. If I’m verified in California, why shouldn’t I be able to do it in any other state? … And it should be federally reviewed, because we obviously have a security issue inour country. If in some states you can just show up, pay a fee and have them hand you a license without having to have any knowledge of what to do, the [criminals] are going to seek those notaries out.” But isn’t the money nice? I asked, trying to lighten her up a bit.
“So far, just the idea that we can turn this into a national, federally regulated, federally controlled, and federally honored career — that’s more important to me than the money. My job is not just a service. I take it very seriously.”
Somehow, even after Feldt’s heartfelt and somewhat exhausting treatise, I still felt capable of being sarcastic and making cheap jokes. I really did.
But that was only until the next morning, when I attended a special talk for state officials, by the dashing FBI agent Derek Siegle, assistant chief of the Investigation Financial Crimes Section. I sort of dozed off a little bit — I’d had my fill of notaries by this time — until I heard him say that only 3 percent of identity thefts occur online and — the real eye-opener — that Illinois is one of the top 10 states for mortgage fraud. In fact, Chicago is home to one of the FBI’s few Identity Theft Task Force offices.
Very sobering information, to quote the NNA’s Timothy S. Reiniger.
By the time I boarded my flight back home to Chicago that afternoon, I can honestly say that I’d begun to look at notaries in a completely different way. And I found out just what conventioneer Ray Zalpa meant when he told me, upon my arrival in Vegas, that “there’s no way to know who’s a notary.”
I began to buckle in, and the woman sitting next to me struck up a conversation. Her name was Linda Murphy, she works at the Chicago accounting firm Desmond and Ahern Ltd., and she’d been on vacation with her husband, she told me.
“I was at the National Notary Association Conference,” I replied.
“I’m a notary!” she said, which didn’t surprise me much. They’re everywhere, apparently.
And we’re all just a little bit safer for it.
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enunn@tribune.com
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Notaries: A very condensed history
Notaries date to ancient Rome, believe it or not. A slave named Tiro, who was secretary to Cicero, is said to have invented a shorthand note-taking system that would later be adopted by Roman public scribes responsible for recording such important events as judicial proceedings, and who became known as notarii.
When the Roman Empire fell, so did literacy, but the importance of notaries rose and continued to evolve. As trusted, literate scribes, they prepared and authenticated official documents for those who could not write, acted as archivists, and, sometimes, gave legal advice.
In the Middle Ages, the church and royalty made particular use of notaries and seals — a ring impressed in hot wax, or ribbons sealed with wax — and notaries also performed weddings. Charlemagne demanded that each abbot, count and bishop have a notary.
In the 13th Century a school of notaries was established in Bologna. Leonardo da Vinci’s father, Ser Piero da Vinci, was a notary. So was Voltaire’s. Louis IX appointed notaries to draw up formal documents in legal settlements, but Louis XIV granted notaries a personal seal with the royal arms, releasing them from their dependence on the courts.
In the New World, a notary, Rodrigo de Escobedo, traveled with Columbus and documented his landing on San Salvador. The first common law notary in the United States, Thomas Fugill, was appointed on Oct. 25, 1639; the first civil law notary was appointed by Louis XIV and arrived in the U.S. in 1663 in French North America.
Over the years, while notaries in other parts of the world became more closely associated with lawyers — in Latin American countries, for instance, the Notario Publico is a high-ranking official with considerable legal skills and training — the American notary’s power diminished (Webster’s New World Dictionary defines the notary public merely as “an official authorized to certify or attest documents, take depositions and affidavits, etc.).
However, vestiges of the European model remain in Louisiana, where notaries have the broadest powers in the U.S. including the practice of drafting private contracts to be preserved in the public sector.
So while notaries in other parts of the world obviously require substantial education and training, the well-educated American notary is a fairly modern concept.
Back in 1957, a California businessman named Raymond C. Rothman — who noticed after he had obtained his own notary license that he had practically no idea what he was doing and nowhere to turn for training and guidance — founded the National Notary Association, which he ran out of his own kitchen. Today the organization is located in Chatsworth, Calif., and has more than 260,000 members and a support staff of 160, whose purpose is to help notaries achieve greater credibility and professionalism, and keep them up to date on state laws and regulations.
The National Notary Association defines the notary as “a public servant appointed by state government to witness the signing of important documents and administer oaths. . . . An impartial witness [who] identifies signers to screen out impostors and to make sure they have entered into agreements knowingly and willingly.” In other words, their purpose is to help prevent fraud.
— Emily Nunn
Source: National Notary Association, Tribune files
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The Illinois notary
Eligibility: 18 years of age; 30 days residency; read and write English; no felony convictions.
Commission fee: $10
Term: 4 years
Bond requirement: $5,000 (notaries must be bonded in 35 states).
Seal requirement: Black inked seal (as opposed to embosser).
Record (or journal) keeping: Recommended but not required. (Only 20 states and the District of Columbia require journals of all notarial acts, despite the fact that they are public records that may be used as evidence in court.)
Fee limit: Illinois notaries may charge $1.
Education: No test or training required.
