Colorful California History Stored Safely Under Wraps

Out of the avalanche of paper work generated by California’s vast governmental bureaucracy each year, millions of documents win a quiet place in history.

The minutes of agency meetings, citizens’ angry letters, regulators’ expense accounts, reports on car accidents and immigration--fully a third of all agency and department records--find a home at the California State Archives.

It is a cool and restful place, unpretentious, revered by its caretakers and as rich in California stories as Gilroy is in garlic.

More than a library, the archives are a catalogue of evidence. the original 1849 state Constitution, handprinted on opaque sheepskin, is carefully preserved here. So are prison records of William (Grey Fox) Miner, the original trademark for Dr. Lepper’s “Electric Oil of Gladness” and an 1864 letter from Abraham Lincoln asking a political favor of California Gov. Frederick Lowe.

It is a place for tracking down your family’s “bad apples,” for digging up what lawmakers really meant to do with a law before it was watered down and spit out by the political process.

Housed on three floors of an aging state building two blocks from the Capitol, the archives consist of about 60,000 cubic feet of paper work--testament to the political shenanigans, policy shifts, petty bureaucratic details and hidden agendas of state government.

The archives are a historical trivia lover’s paradise. Did you know, for example that Gov. James Gillett was routinely delinquent in paying for his subscription to the Sacramento Bee? The elegantly inked dunning notices from the newspaper are archived to prove it. How many Frenchmen came to California in 1852? Check out the big blue census book for that year.

It is a place perfectly suited to archivist Joseph P. Samora, who after 19 years of work in the building says he loves his job so much he’d “do it for free.”

Samora, a laid-back 46-year-old, decorates cakes and collects trivial oddities of his own in his spare time. He won second place in a contest for his glass-enclosed collection of crystallized--”petrified”--rubber bands. On his office wall--collected from the days when he was a young archives clerk whose job it was to remove staples, brads and clips from documents--Samora has displayed dozens of paper fasteners dating from the 19th Century to the present.

Samora’s office, tidy and compact, is walled on one side almost entirely of glass--giving him a view not of the dusty construction site outside, but of the public research area of the archives itself. Through this window Samora keeps a watchful eye on anyone poring over valuable state documents, politely stopping them if they are seen leaning on an aging original or using a smuggled-in pen (pencils are allowed).

One of six state archivists and a fourth-generation Californian, Samora has spent most of his days recently cataloguing the historical records of California homes for juvenile delinquents, particularly the California Youth Authority’s ancient castle-like fortress, Preston School of Industry.

“I think it’s great to see the change from (the criminal justice system’s) snake-pit beginnings,” the archivist says.

Samora also helps determine just what bits of information--trivial and grand--deserve to be catalogued in the Army-green metal boxes and cardboard files cramming the archives.

All state agencies are required to routinely list all records of any policy matters for review by the archivists, who flag any items believed worthy of safekeeping. Documents from nearly every state Supreme Court and Court of Appeal case are also filed here.

Less-prized documents are housed on the top floor of the flat-roofed building, which routinely leaks. Another of Samora’s jobs is helping to determine when to place plastic sheeting over the top-floor documents--an operation that keeps moisture out but locks damaging humidity in.

The most valuable paper work, including the original Constitution, Lincoln’s letter and the original copy of every law ever chaptered by the state of California, is kept in a temperature- and humidity-controlled vault.

Here Samora gingerly removes a leather-bound, gold-embossed book at least two feet high and explains that if a visitor were to take a pen to a page inside and change “and” to “or”, the law of the state would actually be changed.

Between the pages of many of the oldest books are grains of sand--once used to dry the ink from the quill pens used on official documents.

In one of the brown-and-gold books shelved unobtrusively among hundreds of others is one of the first laws in California. Chapter 1 of 1850 requires the secretary of state to retain “all public records, registered maps, books, papers, rolls, documents or other writings...in any way connected with the political history and past administration of the government of California” in the state archives.

Samora said simply, “It seems they had foresight.”