NEW YORK » Since the days when Nelson A. Rockefeller was governor and John V. Lindsay was mayor, Manhattanites have dreaded the black-and-red notices with Norman Goodman’s signature inside. They have disdained Goodman, the New York County clerk, as the man who summoned a million jurors, and their complaint was not about his calling in the other 999,999.

Their math was off — way off. After about 250,000 summonses a year for 45 years, Goodman’s total is far higher than a mere million. He has sent out between 11 million and 12 million summonses.

In a few weeks, people will no longer need to dislike Goodman. He is retiring from his $136,000-a-year job. For the first time since Richard M. Nixon was president, someone else will hear prospective jurors’ many, and sometimes creative, excuses for not serving. (And yes, the Nixon White House notified Goodman in September of Goodman’s very first year on the job that jury summonses for the president and his daughter Patricia had been forwarded from their apartment at 810 Fifth Ave. — and that they were claiming exemptions.)

Come January, he will no longer be the final arbiter for people trying to dodge a schedule-disrupting staple of life in a democracy, jury duty. No longer will he wade through doctors’ notes with forged signatures, or worse. Once, years ago, a woman sent in a container of ashes, saying they were her husband’s remains after cremation. Goodman had them tested. They were from cigarettes.

"I’m 90 years old," he said. His last day will be Dec. 31 — by coincidence, his 91st birthday.

Prospective jurors probably assume he is fearsome or forbidding. He said he had been walking around his office with a walker lately (but it was nowhere to be seen during two recent visits). And Madonna, who answered a summons from Goodman in July, said by email that Goodman was "chatty and full of stories," so much so that he "could have been Woody Allen’s lost brother." Of course, Goodman let her wait in his office to avoid gawkers in the jury assembly room.

Six mayors and seven governors have come and gone during his tenure, but Goodman has stayed on, spending more than half his life in a job he took as a steppingstone to a judgeship he never got. Had he stayed too long?

"No," said Robert M. Morgenthau, who was elected district attorney when Goodman had been in his appointed job for nearly six years and who retired in 2009 when he himself was 90. "He did a great job, he never slowed up, he was conscientious and reliable and well respected. He worked at every problem and solved it. He never said, ‘I can’t handle that.’ It was comforting to know he was there."

Retiring sooner "would have set a bad precedent," Morgenthau added.

Goodman, whose predecessor stepped down when he was only 80, began as a clubhouse politician — first as a Democratic district leader in Inwood, later president of his Democratic club and eventually assistant counsel to the majority leader of the state Senate. But by the 1990s, he had transcended the institution of politics and become an institution in his own right.

"A pillar of the courthouse," said Judith S. Kaye, the state’s chief judge from 1993 to 2008.

He was 2 years old, maybe 3, when the courthouse where he holds court — the imposing New York County Courthouse at 60 Centre St. with the Corinthian portico that "Law & Order" made famous — was completed. (Some history books say 1926, some say 1927.) The rotunda inside was the setting for a reception for him on Wednesday.

He has long since outlived the officials who empowered him. The man who recommended Goodman to be deputy county clerk in 1966 — J. Raymond Jones, Tammany Hall’s first black leader — died in 1991. The man who succeeded Jones as a Democratic kingmaker and whose recommendation helped clinch the clerk’s job for Goodman in 1969 — Frank G. Rossetti — died in 1992.

John F. Werner, the chief clerk and executive officer of the civil branch of state Supreme Court in Manhattan, said the court system that Goodman entered in the 1960s "was much closer to the court of 1900 than is the court of today, and Norman is largely responsible for the changes." The changes include new technology that made it possible to copy court records to microfilm or microfiche in the 1970s and to file cases electronically in the 2000s.

"That has, in the last 10, maybe 15 years, changed the way you practice law," said Maura McLoughlin, president of the Managing Attorneys and Clerks Association of New York State, whose members handle the flow of case-related paperwork at large law firms.

Goodman smoothed the transition, she said, by having his 140-person staff tell lawyers, in a friendly way, how to assemble the various documents that make up a case, rather than ordering them to reject an improperly prepared filing without explanation. "That was the environment Norman Goodman wanted to create," she said, "and did."

Still, he is best known for summoning people to jury duty.

Jurors who do not wish to do their civic duty probably resent the elimination of automatic exemptions from jury service. It was a reform spearheaded by Kaye when she was the chief judge. More than 20 occupations used to be off limits, Goodman said, including lawyers, doctors, podiatrists, chiropractors, undertakers and embalmers. Adding them changed the demographics of the jury pool and the dynamics of the juries that were eventually chosen.

That happened in the 1990s. But Goodman was around in the 1970s, when, he said, a more basic exemption was done away with. "When I came here, women did not have to serve," he said. "They could send back the questionnaire and say, ‘I am a woman.’"

Over the years, Goodman’s name has turned up in countless articles about celebrities who answered jury summonses, such as Henry A. Kissinger, Wynton Marsalis and Joel Grey, and Goodman said he enjoyed his 90 minutes with Madonna.

"She was very conversational," he said. "She said she didn’t mind serving."

But he admitted that he was not terribly familiar with her work. "‘Material Girl,’ I had heard of it," he said. That was all.

This came from someone who described himself as a "sort of" Sinatra fan, and no wonder. Frank Sinatra performed at his high school prom in New Haven in 1941, with Tommy Dorsey’s band.

Given the extraordinary number of people Goodman has summoned, it should not come as a surprise that he has even summoned himself — several times, in fact. But he was impaneled only once. The case involved a teenage girl whose mother’s boyfriend had been accused of raping and sexually abusing her, Goodman said.

"I sat on the case for four days, and we convicted the defendant in about 30 seconds," he said.

But Goodman had some advice for his fellow jurors: Not so fast.

"I said, ‘Wait, let’s not tell the judge — if we wait another 10, 15 minutes, we’ll get lunch,’" he recalled. "So we waited, and they sent lunch."

© 2014 The New York Times Company