SAN QUENTIN, Dec. 15 — Charles Manson was installed as the 97th occupant of San Quentin’s Death Row Tuesday.

“He was very calm,” said Associate Warden Joseph R. O’Brien after Manson was whisked here from Los Angeles in a bus escorted by three other vehicles and a helicopter. “He didn’t seem excited about anything.”

After a short medical examination on his arrival late Monday night, officials briefed him on Death Row’s rules and commissary privileges. Then he was taken upstairs to the row by elevator.

Manson’s transfer came more than two years after his arrest for the August, 1969, slayings of actress Sharon Tate and six others. He was sentenced to California’s gas chamber on seven counts. .

His trip northward from Los Angeles began less than an hour after he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the deaths of two others—movie stuntman Donald (Shorty) Shea and musician Gary Hinman.

Manson’s first chance at evading his sentence will come via the automatic review of his seven death sentences by the California Supreme Court.

His next chance lies in the possibility that the current unofficial moratorium on the death penalty in the United States will be made permanent by legislation or court decisions.

The last person executed in the San Quentin gas chamber was Aaron Mitchell, a police killer, on April 22, 1967. One inmate, Doyle Terry, another police killer, has been on the row for 10 years, the longest of any of the present occupants.

Manson’s new home is a cell 4 1/2 feet wide and 7 feet long, containing a simple bed, toilet, wash basin and a table and chair. He can share the use of a television set in the corridor with inmates in two adjacent cells.