With 15 years of memories still fresh in her mind, Chris Green said farewell to a long career of civil service.

In one of her last days on the job, Federal Way's city clerk shuffled a stack of papers, making room for a large bouquet of flowers. A weekly planner, filled with scribbled appointments that end abruptly after the first week of August, covers most of the surface of her desk. Across the room, Green points out a trio of plaques honoring her five, ten, and now 15 years with the city.

She occupies a spacious office in the new city hall building, with windows offering a view of 333rd Street, but she often looks back to the city's early years-crammed in a noisy old fire station on 28th Avenue-as the most memorable time of her career.

Before her career with the city began, Green, a Washington native born in Pasco and raised in Fircrest and Sumner, worked as a freelance paralegal for Bob Stead, who became one of Federal Way's first council members and its second mayor.

She attended her first council meeting in November of 1989 and went to work for the city in December as the deputy city clerk. In 1995, Green was promoted when the position for city clerk became vacant.

In 15 years, Green has taken on the role of Federal Way's official record keeper and historian, managing most of the city's documents and a file of more than 3,500 records.

When she walks out through the tall glass doors of City Hall for the last time this week, she'll take with her the memories of the city's infancy, when Green helped a newly incorporated and bustling city organize its first public records.

"I have very fond memories of those early years," Green told the Federal Way News last week.

"It was just myself and two other people in that front office back then," Green recalled, "and we had to become jacks of all trades."

"There couldn't have been more than a half dozen people on staff, total," Green said.

And when the team learned to overcome staff shortages, they still faced an old city hall building that presented Green and the city employees with its own unique challenges.

"It was just a fun place," Green said of the old fire station, which received little more than a thorough cleaning and a new coat of paint on its dingy yellow walls when the city first set up its headquarters there.

She recollected how, during the first city council meetings held in the old building, the clerks would have to stop recording and postpone hearings because of the rumble of airplanes in route to SeaTac.

"And because that old building was so hot in the summer," Green said, "we had to leave all the windows open."

From city proclamations to public records requests, Green once hacked out much of the work-now performed automatically by computers-with an old typewriter.

"I had a blue Selectric IBM typewriter that had been loaned to us from the Water and Sewer District," Green said.

The city clerk said she still vividly recalls hammering out the city's first fee ordinances with that machine.

Those first public hearings offered plenty of excitement for Green, who remembers four long lines of 200 citizens eager to give public comment about the young city's new zoning ordinances and comprehensive plan.

The clerks hauled their recording system to each of those hearings, held then at more spacious public places like Decatur High School to accommodate the large number of citizens.

When she retires, Green and husband plan to move across the mountains to an 80-acre farm near Wilbur. After 15 years of a rigorous schedule, she seems comfortably noncommittal about how she'll fill her time outside city hall.

Green said she might use part of their farm to grow lavender, or spend her days working on their old farmhouse when she and her husband find time between fishing trips to nearby Roosevelt Lake.

"I'm just glad for the experience," Green said of her waning career as one of the city's first paid employees, "It's been an opportunity that most people never have the chance to do in their lives."

"Starting something new has been very exciting for me," Green said.