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  • Built in 1937 on Lot 128 in Tract 6388
  • Original commissioner: Susie Reid Hackett, widow of Edward A. K. Hackett, who died in 1916; he was the editor and publisher of The Fort Wayne Sentinel 
  • Architect: Allen G. Siple
  • On August 26, 1937, the Department of Building and Safety issued Mrs. S. R. Hackett a permit for a two-story, 10-room residence with attached garage at 639 South June Street
  • Mrs. Hackett and her husband often spent winters in Southern California and in 1909 built a large house at 1317 South Westlake Avenue, which still stands. The Hacketts had three children; while having been born in Los Angeles in 1910, the youngest, Wayne, was perhaps named for the family's former Indiana home. Mrs. Hackett moved to 807 North Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills, apparently commissioning it herself in 1924. (That house was demolished and replaced in 1976)
  • After a decade in Beverly Hills, Susie Hackett might have decided that she'd moved farther from her original Los Angeles neighborhood, in what is today known as Pico-Union, when she decided to move halfway back east toward downtown. She found one of the remaining Hancock Park lots that had gone begging when the subdivision languished in the Depression after its initial boom during the 1920s. June Street might have seemed a nice geographical compromise, situated as it was between still-thriving downtown Los Angeles and the growing west side of town. Unfortunately Mrs. Hackett had little time in her new house; within in months of moving in, she died there on June 7, 1938
  • Edward A. K. Hackett Jr., now 34 and unmarried, and Wayne Hackett continued to live at 639 South June Street after thier mother's death. (Their sister Catherine had married in 1930.) By early spring 1940, with Wayne, a graduate of Occidental and Harvard Law, planning to marry in the fall, ads appeared in the Times offering 639 South June for sale: "HANCOCK Park—Early California Colonial. 10 rooms. 5 bedrooms. 4 baths. Built 1938. A beautiful home, perfect in every detail." Edward, enumerated in the Federal census taken in April 1940 as a greeting-card manufacturer, moved to an apartment at 644 Ridgeley Drive nearby
  • 639 South June Street was occupied during the 1940s by shoe manufacturer Bayard Harris Ryder and his wife, née Frances Baker, and their children. The Ryders had been renting 312 South McCadden Place in Hancock Park
  • On March 31, 1949, the Citizen-News reported that a burglar had made off with $2,775 worth of jewelry from the Ryders' safe at 639 South June Street. Bayard Ryder told police that the safe "may have inadvertently been left open." The intrusion may have caused the Ryders to go live with his parents in the house they built in 1940 at the lower end of Laurel Canyon
  • Moving from 454 North Las Palmas Avenue in Hancock Park, attorney Lloyd Melvin Smith and his family were occupying 639 South June Street by April 1950. Mr. Smith was civic-minded; in addition to his private practice, he served as president of the city's Board of Public Utilities and Transportation Commissioners. Edith Smith, née Jayne, was active locally in the Wilshire Y.M.C.A. and served as president of the Wilshire Community Co-ordinating Council. The Smiths left 639 South June Street in 1960 to move back to the eastern Hollywood Hills, where they'd lived before moving to Hancock Park
  • Following the Smiths at 639 South June Street were eminently respectable Angelenos with West Adams roots. Francis Haynes Lindley was an attorney whose doctor uncles on his mother's side (one of whom was his namesake) were well-known in Los Angeles. After his retirement from medicine, his uncle Dr. John R. Haynes served the city as president of the Board of Water and Power Commissioners from 1917 until his death in 1937, in addition to holding many other city and county government posts and being the benefactor of numerous charities; Dr. Haynes's West Adams house at 2324 South Figueroa Street, designed by Robert Farquhar and demolished for the Harbor Freeway, appears in Sam Watters's Houses of Los Angeles 1885-1919. Francis Lindley was raised three blocks north at 2007 South Figueroa in the house his parents built in 1904. His father was Dr. Walter Lindley, who, among other things, organized the medical school at U.S.C., the first in Southern California; he was also one of the founders of California Hospital. Francis Lindley was a graduate of Harvard and the U.S.C. School of Law and would continue his family's philanthropy by serving as president of the Haynes Foundation, which fostered research in the social sciences, from 1937 to 1977. He was also active in Town Hall Los Angeles, a progressive group, still going strong, whose original mission was to "...to realize, through study and education, the ideals of democracy, and to aid, through civic education, in the accomplishment of an enlightened and harmonious community." Lindley became president of Town Hall Los Angeles in 1952. From 1965 to 1967 he served as a commissioner of the Department of Water and Power. In addition to those activities and continuing to practice law, he served as a deputy city attorney, and, later, an assistant city attorney
  • By 1954, Francis Lindley and his wife, née Grace McCanne, had left their former home in Berkeley Square and were living in Hancock Park at 344 South Las Palmas Avenue—interestingly, in a house, still there, quite similar in form and style to their 15 Berkeley Square, giving another echo of that vanished enclave, in the same way of the Charles Clarke Keelys' eventual move to a Hancock Park house at 100 South Hudson Place that is very like their former 11 Berkeley Square—the only legacies of the Square in brick and mortar. It was from Las Palmas Avenue that Mr. and Mrs. Lindley moved to 639 South June, staying for the rest of their lives. Grace Lindley died at 71 on May 6, 1980. Francis Haynes Lindley died at 639 South June Street on January 14, 1987, age 87. They are buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery
  • 639 South June Street was on the market by the spring of 1987 listed at $895,000
  • The obstetrician-gynecologist Howard Mandel and his wife, Dr. Susan Mandel, succeeded Francis Lindley at 639 South June Street and would stay for 25 years. Additions and alterations carried out by the Mandels included a swimming pool in 1988 and house and garage expansions. Changes after the Mandels included a new pool 


Illustration: Private Collection