More History Comes to Light
While the demolition phase didn’t reveal anything unexpected about our house, I have found a few more interesting strands of information (including one I’d forgotten about).
A family who lived in our house in the 1920s were the ones who added the driveway and the early garage (which, I’m now reminded, came from a Redimade building kit). They had a son in 1921, Donald, who wrote a brief account of his childhood memories in 1983 and whose own son later left it lying around on the Internet for me to discover! I was in touch with the son, who checked in with his mother about it (his father who’d written it had passed away), but no additional photos were forthcoming. Disappointing! But it’s fun to read some of his recollections of the house and the neighborhood from that early time. He described the neighborhood as full of other children (still the case), with an exotically English couple around the corner. Our street was a “quiet and respectable, somewhat old-fashioned street,” which I think could describe it today, 100 years later!
By way of description, he wrote: “This house… was a typical California bungalow, with a low roof and overhanging eaves, shingled on the outside. There was a large front porch with pillars of water-rounded stones. In the backyard was a large walnut tree, excellent for climbing.” All still true, except for the walnut tree! Here is a link to a post about the stripping of paint from the porch stones, which had been painted over when we moved in.
Who were these 1920s owners? William H. was a salesman in the steel industry (there was a local steel industry in 1920??) and Hazel H. stayed home with their son. They were registered Republicans (as was everyone in town then, apparently) and owned the house, which in 1930 was valued at $7,000. They had a radio (thanks, U.S. census data)! His ancestry was German, and typical of many people in California, he had been born in the midwest: in Indiana to parents born in Indiana and Dayton, Ohio. Hazel, on the other hand, was California-born, as was her mother (well back into the 19th c!). Neither had graduated from high school (their grandson would become a physics professor), yet he describes that “(m)y father was quite well self-educated, and my mother believed that she stood for the finer things of life, but this latter took the form mainly of ‘good taste’ in things like household decoration and clothes.” Wouldn’t I love to see how she had appointed this living room!!
He continued, “From his experience as a soldier in France, and later as a student-soldier in Toulouse, my father acquired a taste for wine and an interest in good food and the good life in general. When we lived [there], we often went into downtown Los Angeles to have dinner at Taix's French Restaurant, a typical table d’hôte where everyone at the long table was served from a common soup tureen.” Given the French strain in our family, you won’t be surprised to know that this caught my eye (especially the part about Toulouse, where my spouse was a student)! Taix French Restaurant was established in 1927 and was rebuilt in Echo Park in 1964, but persisted all this time—I ate there in the late 1990s at some point—but now it’s slated to be replaced by some apartments, sadly. It had quite an old-fashioned family feeling (the Cultural Heritage Commission recently agreed to a somewhat meaningless historical designation of the historic signs and not much else)!
Donald’s memories included Saturday silent movies at the local film and vaudeville theater, straight down the street on the nearby avenue about five blocks to the west (it’s still there). From that same thoroughfare, they made regular trips from his sedate surroundings to the big city by street car. The Red Car, for 15 cents, would deposit them in the midst of the excitement of the Broadway shopping and theater district of downtown Los Angeles, which was having a heyday in the 1920s just before the commercial energy was siphoned off to points west of downtown, along Wilshire Blvd.
This family moved to another, newer house a few miles away after 1930. Maybe they wanted a house with a hallway! Huh!
The immediate post-WWII period saw some action around our future house, some bad and some good, but it didn’t end well. In 1946 there was an incident involving check kiting, mistaken identity, and concealed weapons charges! The local paper made light of it, though, saying that the 27 year old suspect “admitted, and with reason, that ‘everything happens to me.’” (Bertonneau—more folks of French extraction.) I think this may have been a cousin who was living with them. By May, 1947 things were looking up for a Miss Whipple, as the newspaper reported (!) on her pink-and-white-themed engagement party for 25 guests held at the house, complete with “printed napkins (bearing) the names of the betrothed, revealing the engagement.” (The future bride’s grandmother was another Bertonneau).
However, the following month brought a “forced sale” of the property noticed in the newspaper. I wonder how they defined a “twin sized bedroom”? “Needs some redecorating.” Ha ha!
Presuming it sold at that point, whoever bought it didn’t stay for long. The house was for sale again in 1949, but this time it would cost you $11,000. The following has to go down in the annals of great real estate descriptions:
I think it’s actually 30 feet by 13 feet, but either way, yes, it is unusual for a small house to have such a large living room (even if the proportions and crossing foot-traffic make it very challenging to furnish comfortably!), and that was well worth a look, even for us sixty-five years later! Swell and dandy indeed!