PAUL LEE BERNARDIS

Sacramento County

Biographies

PAUL LEE BERNARDIS

PAUL LEE BERNARDIS.--A wide-awake, far-seeing and experienced man of affairs in the Sacramento business world is Paul Lee Bernardis, one of the proprietors of the capital city Planing Mill, widely known as a very reliable establishment for any kind of work, however varied and difficult, it undertakes to do. Associated with him is J. P. Moore and all having dealings with the firm well know that they make a team of the best kind. They formed their partnership in 1914, the year made so memorable by the outbreak of the World War; and few business concerns have done more to meet the changed and ever-changing conditions brought about by the world upheaval than this representative northern California house. In their busy season they employ at least twenty men, and they turn out an immense amount of first-class interior and exterior finishing. They have their own lumber yard, make ice cream cabinets and refrigerators, and their products are called for from all parts of the state.

Mr. Bernardis was born in 1886, in Austria, and there he was educated. He had heard much about the United States and the advantages in the New World, having met a few Austrians who had tried their luck out here and had come back for a visit, and he had also learned something of the far-away California; and hither he undertook to come, in 1903. The great Eastern metropolis interested him not a little, but he stuck to his resolution and hurried West, and stopped in San Francisco until 1906, when he located in Sacramento.

Able easily to impress strangers with both his native ability and his worthiness, Paul Bernardis found employment in the Southern Pacific Railroad shops, and there in time he was fitted for his life-work. When he came to form his partnership and create the Capital City Mills, he moved aggressively in the great work Sacramento city looked to its contractors to do, and the firm did all the interior wood-work and finish for the Physicians Building, Sutter Candy Store, McClatchy residence, Judge O’Brien’s residence, the Rideout Hospital and grammar school at Marysville, and also the Post Office Building there, and since 1921, among other notable structures, the public schools of Elmhurst, Eldorado, Newton Booth, Highland Park, now called the Sierra, Bret Harte, and additions to the Fremont and the Leland Stanford, and furnished and installed the work in the Rosemont Grill, at Sacramento. In national politics a Republican, Mr. Bernardis never fails to support, in good non-partisan fashion, the men and the measures he regards as best for the locality in which he lives and thrives. He is also a live wire in the Chamber of Commerce at Sacramento.

At Sacramento, in 1910, Mr. Bernardis was married to Miss Nellie Lubetich, of Sacramento; and they have a son, born May 17, 1923. Mr. Bernardis enjoys the social life of the Elks and the Druids, to which he belongs, and is fond, as is his good wife, of all out-of-doors life. He is interested in the past history and the future prospects of Sacramento County.

Transcribed by: Jeanne Sturgis Taylor.

Source: Reed, G. Walter, History of Sacramento County, California With Biographical Sketches, Pages 916-917. Historic Record Company, Los Angeles, CA. 1923.