VENTURA COUNTY NEWS : 1 Congressional Career, Fresh Out of the Box

Work a couple of decades for a company and you’ll walk away with a gold-colored watch, if you’re lucky.

Work a couple of decades in Congress and you’ll haul off boxes crammed with memos, speeches, files on bills long dead, letters from constituents seeking your merciful intervention with Social Security or the IRS, invitations to supermarket openings, personal notes from the Oval Office, plaques, pictures, daily agendas, weekly agendas, monthly agendas, and on and on.

In 1993, Bob Lagomarsino departed Congress with 118 boxes. Another 46 from his days in the state Senate were discovered in the vault of a defunct Ventura bank. Lagomarsino didn’t know precisely what was stashed in all the cartons, but his wife Norma knew there was no way they would be hanging around the house for long.

That’s how Lagomarsino came to the oddly disquieting position of seeing his career reconstructed--memo by memo, speech by speech, box by box--at an archive under construction at Cal State Channel Islands.

“When I stood up to say a few words at a reception for the archives, it was like an out-of-body experience,” Lagomarsino said. “It was like I was coming back and watching a memorial to myself.”

About half the $200,000 the archive will require already has been raised. About $40,000 will be used to remodel 1,100 square feet in the Cal State library. Other big expenses will include fees for an archivist to catalog the enormous mass of congressional whatnots--weeding out crank letters, routine pleas from constituents, the stray bit of classified material, and items that were numbingly irrelevant from the minute they landed on Lagomarsino’s desk.

So, what’s really buried in all those boxes?

“Mostly files and records and plaques, things of that kind,” said Lagomarsino, with the affable vagueness of a career politician.

I didn’t believe him, so I checked it out. And, from my cursory inspection, I concluded that the boxes contained mostly files and records and plaques, things of that kind.

It wasn’t the stuff of the History Channel, but it did allow a glimpse into the day-to-day office life of a late-20th century congressman.

I found an invitation to the inauguration of the president of Honduras in Tegucigalpa. And a list of Micronesian business contacts for contractors who want to make a bundle, including the public works minister on the island of Yap.

There was a letter that began: “Thank you for your kind invitation to attend your Eagle Scout Court of Honor on March 4 . . . “ And another congratulating an Oxnard principal on the opening of his elementary school. And another commending a Carpinteria firefighter for 30 years of service.

A big box was marked “Casmalia Waste Dump.” Other boxes were heavy with bills co-sponsored by Lagomarsino, campaign position papers, speeches, voting records, election data, press releases.

“Ventura County was bizarrely partitioned under a congressional redistricting plan approved by the state Legislature,” thundered a 1982 release I plucked out at random.

Scholars who drop in after the archive opens early next year may be seeking insights into the creation of Channel Islands National Park, Lagomarsino’s trophy achievement in Congress. Or they may be casting around for tidbits from Lagomarsino’s Congressional Task Force on Afghanistan, or the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, or a slew of other House committees on which he served.

What they won’t find is Deep Throat or the truth about UFOs.

Lagomarsino never latched on to the kind of issues that shower other politicians with national attention.

“He wasn’t a grandstander,” said Patricia Clark Doerner, the organizer of the archive effort. “He just plugged away and did what needed to be done.”

One part of the archive will be furnished to resemble Lagomarsino’s longtime office in Room 2332 of the Rayburn Building. It will feature vintage family photos, an antiquated computer on an old oak desk, the red leather chair that Lagomarsino used during his state Senate days--and, sometimes, Lagomarsino, who will be on hand for interviews and oral histories by Cal State students.

He is of mixed minds about the prospect of adulation.

“I have the same kind of reaction when I see my name up there on the Channel Islands Visitor’s Center,” he said. “It’s a little uncomfortable, but not so much that I’d say no to it.”

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.