Old Governor’s Office Popular : Capitol Visitors Can Walk Through Its History

There’s a spot in the state Capitol where visitors can step for a moment into the life of a governor named George.

Admitted behind heavy locked doors, tourists may peer at the chief executive’s desk and admire his office’s elegant chandeliers and ceramic spittoons.

On the desk are telegrams wrapped in a shoestring-like material called “red tape.” They came from anxious relatives looking for loved ones in the earthquake and fire that had recently devastated San Francisco.

One telegram catches most visitors’ eyes: “Hear rumors of great disaster through an earthquake in San Francisco but know nothing of the real facts. Call upon me for any assistance I can render. Theodore Roosevelt.”

The time is April, 1906, and the governor is George C. Pardee. “Red tape” has not yet become a bureaucratic figure of speech, and gold and silver coins fill the vault down the hall.

Welcome to the State Capitol Historic Tour, conducted hourly at the old governor’s office on the first floor of the Capitol. This room, with its heavy velvet curtains and elegant furniture, is not to be confused with the present governor’s office, which is about a minute’s walk down a modern hallway and has no chandeliers or spittoons.

One of two popular hourlong Capitol jaunts, the historic tour takes small groups of visitors through the carefully restored rooms in the West Wing that once housed the state’s top executives.

The other--the Capitol Tour--runs visitors up and down the restored building, with guides discussing California history, government, the legislative process and the $68-million restoration of the century-old house of government.

The historic tour allows visitors to be guided through the first-floor rooms while examining antiques and reproductions of papers and furniture that represent an era when both the state and its government were much smaller.

Tourists can chuckle over the governor’s soundproof telephone booth. Because phone connections around the turn of the century were not clear, the box allowed the governor to make important calls in peace.

There’s also plenty of that original “red tape” that government officials once used only to tie up bundles of paper in the secretary of state’s office.

“Remember,” guide Mike Karr recently told a tour group, “that this was before staples or rubber bands. People used all kinds of things to keep paper together.”

Stepping into the treasurer’s office, tourists can discover how heavy a sack of gold really is--though the “gold” is really a 73-pound sack of buckshot--and attempt to stop a moving 22,000-pound door to the state vault that was used between 1928 and 1975.

Since the tours began in January of 1982, more than 1 million people have heard the stories of California government that began with the state’s admission to the union in 1850. There have been more than 53,000 tours of the building.

The tours are confined to the original Capitol, which was completed in 1874 and restored to its 19th-Century appearance between 1976 and 1982. On their own, visitors also can wander through the less elegant annex, opened in 1952, to peek into the present governor’s office lobby.

Most find that the 19th Century holds more intrigue than the 20th, according to tour manager Janet Cassie.

o “You don’t have to take the tour of historic rooms,” Cassie said. “You can walk by and peek in. But it’s so much more fun to go inside and look at the artifacts.”

What’s fun for visitors is hearing the stories the guides tell of the people who worked in the rooms, like Charles Curry, secretary of state in 1902. His sister, Minerva, worked in his office, but never voted for her brother because women could not vote until 1911.

There’s the story of state Treasurer Truman Reeves, who in 1906 had $7 million in gold and silver in the state vault because property holders all over the state had just paid their taxes.

But perhaps the most interesting characters of all, say the guides, are the tourists who come by the thousands to ogle the antiques, ask questions and mix up the characters in the state story.

While touring the old governor’s office, last used by Gov. Earl Warren in 1952, one elderly woman recently looked around and whispered to a friend, “It’s a shame that Gov. Deukmejian doesn’t use this nice office they fixed up for him. It’s so pretty.”

George C. Pardee would probably agree.