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UC Berkeley library gets grant to catalog Pat Brown documents
Adrian Ortiz puts on some of the final touches to one of the exhibits of former California Gov. Pat Brown at the California State Archives and the California State Museum for History, Women and the Arts in Sacramento, Calif., Monday April 18, 2005. The exhibit included documents and artifacts from Pat Brown's from the state archives collection.
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AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli
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Governor-elect Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, holds up a local newspaper proclaiming his victory over Sen. William Knowland in the race for Calif. Governor on Nov. 5, 1958.
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AP Photo
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Pat Brown on the campaign trail with a very young supporter.
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Photo from patbrowndocumentary
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Governor Jerry Brown recently became the longest serving governor in California history. And now researchers may get a chance to learn more about his late father: former Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown.
UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library is organizing its large archive of Pat Brown documents.
The library has received a $164,000 grant to help it tackle the task. The archive includes 1,030 cartons of documents, seven boxes of photos, and five boxes of audio material donated to the campus in 1968—and only a small amount has been put in order.
"For the most part we’re just looking at a lot of papers on different topics related to the ‘60s," said project archivist David Ulich, who has two assistants helping him sort all of them out. "Right now, I’m just actually sorting through his office papers from when he was a governor."
But as the team plows through the material, it has stumbled upon some interesting items, such as a 1923 newspaper clipping featuring a very young Pat Brown.
"It looks like a high school newspaper and Pat Brown is right on the front striking kind of a pose, and he’s basically a student body secretary," said Ulich. "So I thought that was a lot of fun, especially seeing that his political proclivities started so young."
The archivist hopes to have all of the documents in order by January 2015.
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Pat Brown served two terms as governor of California from 1959 to 1967. He died in 1996 at the age of 90.
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