Big Day Today for Lagomarsino on Local CSU Campus

It was just another day at the office last week for former Rep. Robert J. Lagomarsino.

Well, at least a reasonable facsimile of his old legislative office, re-created in an archival wing set to open today at the Cal State Channel Islands library.

The fledgling university near Camarillo is the official repository for tens of thousands of papers, photographs and awards generated during Lagomarsino’s 34 years in elected office--first as Ojai mayor, then state senator and finally Ventura County congressman.

Supporters of the project have raised nearly $200,000 the past two years to pay experts to record and catalog everything from constituent correspondence to congressional transcripts from the Watergate hearings.

Many of those documents will be available to researchers starting in September.

About $40,000 was used to create a heat- and humidity-controlled storage area and reading room for the collection, as well as a gated exhibit room where archivists have reproduced Lagomarsino’s office down to his old coat rack and walnut desk.

“So this is where all my stuff went,” said Lagomarsino, taking a sneak peak at the exhibit last week. Along with today’s official opening, a party will be held for those who supported the project.

‘This is all very nice, especially because we don’t have to store it all in the backyard anymore,” he added. “I hope it can be of value to someone.”

Project supporters and university officials say the archives and exhibit room are a fitting tribute to the 74-year-old ex-lawmaker, a longtime backer of efforts to establish a four-year public university in Ventura County.

While serving as a state senator in 1969, Lagomarsino introduced the first piece of legislation calling for creation of a local Cal State campus.

And in 1987 he interceded on the county’s behalf with then-Gov. George Deukmejian to help secure $7 million to buy land for the campus. While the land was purchased, that nearby agricultural site was passed over in favor of developing the university at the former Camarillo State Hospital site.

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Even in 1998, six years after losing a reelection bid to oil-rich fellow Republican Michael Huffington, Lagomarsino was among a group of university boosters who traveled to Long Beach to urge Cal State trustees to take possession of the closed mental hospital and turn it into a college campus.

“He has been a true champion for this university,” CSUCI President Handel Evans said. “Bob’s is the first of what I hope will be many collections of this type.”

Lagomarsino’s files, along with memorabilia of his family’s 100 years in Ventura County, first came into the possession of Cal State officials in 1992.

At that time they were stored out of public view in a small room at the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge.

Joyce Kennedy, who was then director of the satellite facility, said the collection provided a much-needed boost to CSUN’s off-campus center, which had been struggling to stay afloat.

But she said the gift also had larger symbolic significance to those involved in a decades-long campaign to deliver a public four-year university to the area.

“It was an act of faith by this prominent person in something that was still a dream,” Kennedy said. “We had them and we guarded them ferociously. They were our pride and joy.”

The collection was moved to the Channel Islands campus when CSUN’s satellite center transferred to the new campus site in 1999. The satellite will be transformed into the Cal State system’s 23rd campus in the fall of 2002 if enrollment goals are met.

The 146 boxes now have a room of their own, a slightly chilly storage area where archivist Evelyn Taylor and assistant Nicole Volpe are working to reconstruct the congressman’s political life speech by speech, memo by memo and box by box.

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There is correspondence from the work Lagomarsino did on behalf of prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action during the Vietnam War era. There are applications from high school students seeking recommendations to get into military schools.

There also are old bills, personal notes from the Oval Office and volumes of correspondence to constituents, all of it personally signed by Lagomarsino.

“When you work with someone’s papers, you can tell what sort of person they were and I can tell you this: He was a constituent’s politician,” said Taylor, hired in September to sort out the collection. “You can really see that he was a vital part of Ventura County history for more than three decades.”

Even with all the work being done, this is not the final resting place for the Lagomarsino collection.

Plans are in the works to build a state-of-the-art library and media center at the Channel Islands campus. The archives and exhibit would have a prominent place in the new building.

But that is years away. For now, Lagomarsino is content to watch his political life being reassembled like so many museum pieces in an exhibit room where old black-and-white photos compete for space with awards and plaques, including a framed copy of his bill creating the now 150,000-acre Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

“We made no conscious effort to say we’re going to set up the files so that one day we can have these archives,” said the Solimar Beach resident, settling into his old leather chair behind his big walnut desk.

“The only stipulation I ever had about these documents is that they remain in Ventura County,” he said. “I was confident that one day there would be a four-year university and that they would be transferred there.”