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  • Completed in 1932 on Lot 317 in Tract 8320
  • Original commissioner: attorney Thomas Riggs Dempsey
  • Architect: Arthur Rolland Kelly
  • On November 16, 1931, Thomas R. Dempsey was issued a permit for a two-story, 13-room residence with attached garage at 160 South June Street. On December 1, 1931, a permit was issued to Dempsey for revisions to the house's foundation to address apparently unexpected soil conditions
  • Born in Bakersfield on September 27, 1891, to a Kern County farmer, Thomas Dempsey followed a more urban path by becoming a tax attorney in Los Angeles. As a teenager working as a railroad brakeman back in his parents' native Kentucky, he was married in Covington to Elizabeth Howley of that city on October 12, 1910, two weeks after his 19th birthday. Mary Virginia was born a year later, with Ida Teresa arriving in December 1913. Dempsey's draft registration signed in May 1917 gives his address as Covington and indicates that he was employed by a special branch of the U.S. Internal Revenue Department across the river in Cincinnati. It is unclear as to when he received his degree from U.S.C.'s law school, but the family was back west renting a house in Alhambra by late 1919 with Dempsey employed as a tax attorney. In 1920 he bought a stucco bungalow—still standing—at 214 North Ridgewood Place in Los Angeles that had been built by developer Harry Belden two years before. (Belden was the builder of a number of Hancock Park house, including 12 of the 14 houses on June Street between Third and Fourth streets, q.v.) By the spring of 1924 Dempsey bought 1017 Arlington Avenue in Country Club Park (a house now on a very busy thoroughfare and much altered), from which the family would move to 160 South June Street. (While Hancock Park and adjacent subdivisions above Wilshire Boulevard swiftly drew Angelenos from older neighborhoods such as West Adams and easterly Wilshire-corridor districts—even newer ones closer to Wilton Place, which were quickly and unappealingly densified by apartment houses—it also attracted those who had settled nearby but below Wilshire, a seeming social demarcation to some)
  • Per a social note in the Evening Express on May 20, 1929, "Mr. and Mrs. Dempsey are building a beautiful new home in Hancock Park, which will be ready for occupancy early in the winter." It is unclear as to the delay, but it is perhaps remarkable, considering that their house was finished in the depths of the Depression, that the project was completed at all
  • Tax law would run through the Dempsey family. In a ceremony at the Town House in July 1930 Virginia Dempsey, a graduate of the Cumnock School and Marlborough, married Wellman Perry Thayer, a Stanford man who had studied civil engineering but who would become a tax lawyer in the steps of his new father-in-law. Ida Dempsey was graduated from Westlake in June 1932 and married the next month to U.S.C. law student John Coleman Herbst, who would pursue a career as a tax advisor as had his father-in-law. The Herbsts' son Thomas was born in November 1933; the couple divorced in October 1939. (John Herbst had a brief second marriage in 1942. During an air show at the San Diego fairgrounds on the Fourth of July 1946 after having distinguished himself as a wartime flying ace, and less than 24 hours after marrying a third time, Herbst was killed nearly in view of his bride when his Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star jet crash at the Del Mar racetrack.) In a ceremony at the California Club in April 1945, Ida Herbst remarried; William H. Rambo was a physician and horse breeder
  • On December 6, 1933, the Department of Building and Safety issued Thomas Dempsey a permit to add a brick filler wall between the columns of the porte cochère
  • On October 12, 1936, the Dempseys celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary and Virginia Dempsey's birthday with a buffet dinner at 160 South June Street
  • Elizabeth Dempsey reported the loss of a bracelet valued at $11,800 to the police per the Times of October 20, 1940; it is unclear if it was ever recovered 
  • On February 24, 1946, the Times reported the sale the previous month of 160 South June Street to Robert Anthony Smith Jr. for $52,500. The Dempseys moved to an apartment at Country Club Manor on Rossmore Avenue. Thomas Dempsey died in October 1952, Virginia Dempsey in December 1953 
  • Born in San Francisco on August 24, 1914, Robert A. Smith Jr. was an automobile dealer who had been working for the Dodge agency his father established in Glendale in 1934 after 17 years as a San Francisco Chevrolet dealer. The year 1946 was an eventful one for Smith and his family: His third son was born on February 26 just after he and his wife, née Celeste Bercut, another San Francisco native, bought 160 South June. In April, Smith-Golden Dodge announced that it would build a big new sales and service facility in Burbank. On August 1, Robert A. Smith Sr. died in Pasadena; the Burbank location and, apparently, Smith's Dodge franchise for that location, were sold or leased, though the Glendale operations continued under the direction Roger Smith Jr. (By 1953, after he had left Hancock Park to live in La Cañada, Smith appears to have regained the Dodge-Plymouth franchise in Burbank; that year, he bought out his partner in Smith-Golden, the new firm becoming known as Bob Smith, which, selling various makes over the years, remains in business in 2024 as Bob Smith Toyota in La Crescenta.) The Smiths appear to have already relocated to La Cañada by late 1950; the next owner wouldn't be in residence until at least the next year
  • On January 24, 1946, the Department of Building and Safety issued Roger Smith a permit to add a swimming pool to the property
  • On July 30, 1951, a social note in the Times reported that the John Quayle McClures of 170 South June Street had recently given a dinner party honoring Dr. and Mrs. Donald  C. Balfour Jr., visiting from Rochester, Minnesota. "The Balfours...have plans to make Los Angeles their permanent home." As it turned out, the newcomers would soon move into 160 South June just next door to their hosts
  • Born in Rochester on November 14, 1916, Dr. Donald Church Balfour Jr., a gastroenterologist, was a grandson of Dr. William J. Mayo, one of the founding brothers of the Mayo Clinic; Balfour's father was a former surgeon and director emeritus of the hospital. Donald Balfour married 23-year-old Geraldine Mary Thomas of Rochester in March 1942. Mrs. Balfour would give birth to five children in Rochester before her 31st birthday—David, Donald Jr., twins Alan and John, and Carolyn—a sixth, Mary, arriving in Los Angeles in January 1953. Geraldine Balfour plowed into the life of the archetypal upper-middle-class Hancock Park matron, one with enough help at home and the appropriate Buick or Chrysler to pursue volunteer work with vigor. She quickly got involved with the Assistance League, socially the local rival to the Los Angeles chapter of the New York–based Junior League, and became a member of the ladies' auxiliaries of St. Vincent and Good Samaritan hospitals. She also found time to sit on the board of the Third Street School, participate in St. Martha's Guild of St. James' Episcopal Church, and to do the requisite needlework (she was a member of the Needlework Guild of America). The Balfours gained a listing in the Los Angeles Blue Book, the Southwest Blue Book's dogged rival. It was all in keeping with the ideal America as glorified on television during the 1950s, if a step up from June Cleaver, who did her own housework and never seemed to have a life outside of her Mayfield Colonial
  • MRS. GERALDINE BALFOUR, SOCIAL FIGURE HERE, DIES, read the headline in the Times on November 21, 1957. Mrs. Balfour had died "suddenly," her death otherwise unexplained in the press, at home at 160 South June Street the day before. A funeral was held at St. James' Episcopal on November 23. Understandably, Dr. Balfour and his five children left 160 not long after. He remarried a widow with five children in July 1960 and lived a Yours, Mine and Ours life in San Marino, at least until there was a divorce and his third marriage some time before his death at 51 in November 1967
  • It is unclear as to whether Dr. Balfour sold or rented 160 South June Street to Morgan Orlando Adams Jr. and his wife Suzanne, daughter of Hollywood director King Vidor and silent screen star Florence Vidor. Adams was the son of very rich Pasadenans claiming descent from John and John Quincy Adams; he was educated at Thacher and was a member of the Yale class of 1937. He'd grown up at 21 Chester Place (at one time addressed 747 West Adams Street). His father was a yachtsman and later a member of the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners as well as the owner of the Western Mortgage Corporation, of which Junior was vice-president, although his first love was skiing. Along with office buildings along Wilshire Boulevard, he developed the first ski lifts at Mt. Baldy. Suzanne Vidor Armstrong, whose mother divorced her father in 1924 and four years later married classical violinist Jascha Heifetz, divorced her first husband, with whom she had two children, and married Adams in 1946, with whom she would have three. In 1953 Adams moved the family up to Mt. Baldy for three years before returning to the city. The Los Angeles Evening Mirror News reported that Suzanne was granted a divorce on July 27, 1959. Her husband, she testified, "'is a person with a tremendous drive. He was away from home virtually all the time.... He worked seven days a week because he liked to, not because he had to.'" It was apparently soon after the divorce that Suzanne Adams allowed C.B.S. Television to use 160 South June for location filming for episodes of the third season of Perry Mason, including the opener, which would air on October 3, 1959. It is unclear if there was an industry connection between Mrs. Adams and the studio or whether she was aware that the episode, titled "The Case of the Spurious Spinster," involved a husband returning home from a business trip to find his wife demanding a divorce




160 South June Street as seen on television in Perry Mason:
Below, Businessman Bruce Chapman is seen leaving with his secretary
on his way to "International Airport," as LAX was referred to in 1959, off on
a trip to the Orient. Under the impression that Mrs. Chapman is an out-of-control
gambler, he has cut off her funds. The actors are Peggy Knudsen, Karl Weber,
and Mary LaRoche. Brief interior scenes were filmed on a studio set that
replicated the gothic front door but eliminated the window next to it.



  • A year and five days after her divorce was granted, Suzanne Adams married 43-year-old divorced publicist David Fisher Parry in a civil ceremony on August 1, 1960. Parry, who would move into 160 South June Street, headed his own public relations firm in Los Angeles. Having started out working for United Artists in New York, where he was born, and then for Samuel Goldwyn, he would over a long career represent, per his 1992 obituary, the Music Center, the County Museum, the architectural firms of Welton Becket and William Pereira, the J. Paul Getty Trust, and magazines including Architectural Digest and Bon Appétit. The Parrys divorced in December 1968, with 160 South June by then having been placed on the market. The price remained at $170,000 for months; the property values of Hancock Park, along with all central Los Angeles neighborhoods in particular, were at a low ebb in the wake of the riots of 1965 and the recent Manson murder spree. Taken off the market briefly, 160 reappeared in September 1969 at $175,000
  • Scottish-born Alec Roderick Jack was in residence at 160 South June Street during the 1980s. Jack had arrived in the U.S. with his family at the age of seven; he joined E. F. Hutton in 1929 after having been graduated from U.C.L.A. A lifer at Hutton, he became a partner in the firm in 1955 and rose to the position of board chairman in 1970. Jack and his Missouri-born wife, Lela, had a daughter, Susan, who had married in 1966. Empty nesters, the big Hancock Park house seems to have been perhaps an appropriate entertainment venue for a chairman of the board as much as a home for the Jacks
  • The Jacks began to spend more time in Montecito by the late 1980s; they appear to have sold 160 South June to Janice Posey of 100 North McCadden Place, who made renovations and additions to the house in 1988 in order to flip the property. The allure of Hancock Park appearing to have recovered in spades, at least to Mrs. Posey, 160 was the market in the summer of 1989 with an asking price of $2,500,000, the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $1,916,000 above the value the property had in 1969. The house lingered on the market until the spring of 1990, the price by then having been reduced to $2,295,000, a figure that, when adjusted for inflation, approximates the value placed on the house in 2023. It is unclear as to what the house might have sold for in 1990, but it is very curious that an advertisement appeared in the Times in July 1995 offering 160 South June Street for $949,000; real estate websites in 2023 report that the property last sold for $950,000 on June 12, 1997  
  • Owners since 1990 have added an additional carport (1992), made second-floor additions to the residence (1997), and replaced the roof (2014)


Illustrations: Private Collection; CBS