PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES





  • Built in 1927 on Lot 299 in Tract 8320
  • Original commissioner: real estate developer Charles C. Albright as his own home
  • Architect: Lester G. Scherer
  • According to permits issued by the Department of Building and Safety on March 5, 1927, real estate developer Charles C. Albright originally intended to build Lester Scherer's design on Lot 395 in Tract 8320, to be addressed 238 South Hudson Avenue; plans were very soon transferred to Lot 299 in Tract 8320, a site at 340 North June Street also overlooking the Wilshire Country Club fairway, where it stands today. Permits for the transferred project, a 13-room residence with attached garage, were issued on March 24, 1927, just three weeks after those authorizing it to be built at 238 South Hudson
  • Charles Chesley Albright moved into 340 North June Street with his wife and two children. Born in Willapa, Washington, on April 27, 1888, Albright married Florence Ingersoll in Hawaii, where he was a reporter for The Honolulu Advertiser and she was visiting a married sister from her native Buffalo. While the couple stated on the marriage license that their ages were both 23, the bride was actually 3½ years older than the groom, she having been born on September 18, 1884. (The age fudge would continue throughout the Albrights' marriage and all through her life, a common statistical version of the sort of vanity today augmented by plastic surgery.) The Albrights returned to the states and settled for a time in Redlands, where he went into real estate and where Helene was born on July 20, 1911, and Charles Jr. on February 20, 1913. The Albrights subsequently moved to Santa Monica, down to 1325 West 53rd Street, and then to a bungalow at 208 North St. Andrews Place, from which they would move to Hancock Park
  • Charles Albright did not get to spend many years at 340 North June Street. On the morning of September 8, 1932, he was struck down by a passing motorist after getting out of his car, which he'd just parked across the street from his office at 124 South La Brea Avenue; he never regained consciousness before he died the next morning at Hollywood Receiving Hospital. Obituaries illustrated with his picture in the Times and Citizen-News recounted his real estate efforts, which included a Valley tract he developed with Thomas C. Bundy—at the time of his death, his firm was known as Bundy & Albright—and another on 1,000 acres of Valley land he'd bought from legendary pioneer developer Moses H. Sherman, who coincidentally died on the same day as Albright
  • Helene Albright had been graduated from Marlborough and was a student at U.C.L.A., as was Charles Albright Jr., at the time of their father's death. They and their mother remained at 340 North June Street until early 1935, when Mrs. Albright took an apartment at the northwest corner of Serrano Avenue and San Marino Street in the recently built Linda Vista


As seen in the Los Angeles Times on November 27, 1927


  • Purchasing 340 North June Street from Florence Albright was automobile parts and accessories manufacturer Frank Joseph Laher. The Laher Spring and Tire Corporation, with factories throughout the west as well as in Memphis, produced suspension and brake parts and such items as literal auto trunks, oblong canvas-covered boxes that were strapped to the rears of cars before automotive designs included an integral bustle. Born in Medford, Wisconsin, on December 9, 1886, Frank Laher married 22-year-old North Dakota-born Lavelle Woods in Vancouver, Washington, on June 13, 1914. Both then living in Portland, he was a machinist and she a telephone operator. The Lahers, who would have no children, eventually settled in Oakland, from which they moved south to 340 North June Street. The couple would put the property on the market in the summer of 1942; the Depression and recently declared war had decimated Hancock Park values. One ad in the Times, citing an asking price of $32,500, claimed that the house was built, exclusive of the lot, for $125,000
  • Lawrence Evans Kunkler was president of the Metallizing Corporation of America, based in Chicago, which offered a process in which surfaces could be sprayed with molten metal to prevent corrosion. "Metallizing" was a trade name. In 1941 Kunkler had been sued for divorce on grounds of cruelty by his second wife, Virginia, whom he married in 1929; as reported in the Times on June 29, 1942, Kunkler had just been sprung from jail after having been arrested on a charge of bigamy, the complaint having been signed by Virginia. It seems that he had jumped the gun and married a third time before the decree was final. It is unclear how the bigamy charge was handled legally, but a lengthy item prominent on the first society page of the Times on July 6 chronicled the many entertainments honoring Lawrence and his latest wife, twice-divorced Violette Saenz Overell Dawes, some given by Southwest Blue Book listees and one by her sister, Josephine, who was then married to John Wayne. (The Saenz sisters' father was the long-time Cuban consul in Los Angeles; Josephine Wayne would divorce the actor in 1945 and many years later marry potato-chip manufacturer Cyril Nigg of 500 Muirfield Road.) Lawrence and "Vi," as she was known familiarly, returned to Chicago after the parties but, apparently having noticed that 340 North June was on the market that summer, decided to buy it
  • On September 8, 1943, Lawrence Kunkler was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety to repair fire damage—"paneling, framing, flooring, beams, hearth, wiring and windows"—in an unspecified part of the house
  • What the Kunklers' friends saw in him is unclear, but before long Violette would regret marrying a man divorced by at least one of his wives for cruelty and who had technically, apparently, committed bigamy. Vi's daughter by her first marriage, Renée Overell, would be married in 1945 and go off to live in Kansas. Sex and money would seem to be the obvious conclusion as to why Violette would three years later cut a very strange deal with her unpleasant husband, one in which both parties signed a contract on March 12, 1948, stating that if he ever mistreated her in the future, he would give her 340 North June, valued at $75,000, and provide $375 in monthly alimony. His charming behavior included having once left his wife stranded on a Mexican vacation with just $1.50 in her purse. (During another trip south of the border in the spring of 1948, according to police reports, burglars made off with $20,000 worth of paintings, jewelry, and furs from 340.) Resorting to his fists within a matter of months after the contract was signed, a drunken Kunkler, according to her charges when filing for divorce in July 1949, beat her in a New York restaurant, at a Chicago hotel, and at home and, "very, very drunk," called her vile names in front of 300 people. The specific grounds were "extreme and habitual cruelty." Violette also sued for enforcement of the 1948 contract. She was granted a decree on October 17, winning the title to 340 North June Street and the $375 alimony. He kept title to his business and to Rancho Lariat, the couple's Riverside County dude ranch. Violette Kunkler remained in possession of 340 until mid 1959, when she sold the property and moved to a house at 1738 North Vista Street in Hollywood
  • John E. Anderson, an attorney and C.P.A. for whom the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at U.C.L.A. is named, was the next owner of 340 North June Street, in possession by late 1959. The driven son of a Minneapolis barber who became a billionaire, he was born on September 12, 1917; Anderson attended U.C.L.A. on an ice-hockey scholarship before receiving a graduate business degree from Harvard and his J.D. from Loyola Law in Los Angeles and from there achieved dizzying business and philanthropic accomplishments, best recorded here and here. He moved into 340 with his wife, née Margaret Stewart, and five children; Mrs. Anderson died of cancer on March 25, 1965. Two years and six days later, John married 33-year-old Marion Mazick, who moved into 340. On September 19, 1969, 17-year-old Deborah Anderson died in an automobile accident at Newport Beach, which event, along with their rising fortune, might have been part of the decision by her father and stepmother to leave upper-middle-class Hancock Park for the splendor and relative safety of 10445 Bellagio Road in Bel-Air
  • On January 21, 1960, the Department of Building and Safety issued John E. Anderson a permit to remodel the existing 20-by-40-foot pool at 340 North June Street; on June 26, 1963, he was issued a permit for a kitchen remodeling
  • The ownership of 340 North June Street during the 1970s is as yet unclear. While the 1973 Southwest Blue Book lists the Andersons as living in Bel-Air, they may have been forced to maintain 340 until it sold in a period of low real estate values, or an interim owner may have been in possession until the property appeared on the market in the summer of 1977 priced at $449,500. Estate sales were held at the house each year from 1973 to 1977
  • Owners of 340 North June Street since the departure of the Andersons have made alterations to the property including the construction of a retaining wall at the rear of the property (1994), various interior remodelings, earthquake retrofitting, and a remodeling of the swimming pool (2013)


Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT