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  • Built in 1928 on Lot 165 in Tract 6388
  • Original commissioner: real estate operator William A. Dunn as his own home
  • Architect: Richard D. King
  • On February 27, 1928, the Department of Building and Safety issued "Mr. Will A. Dunn" permits for a two-story, 13-room residence and a one-story, 22-by-30-foot garage at 664 South June Street
  • Will Dunn was born in El Paso, Illinois, on October 25, 1873. He had been working as a traveling cutlery salesman when he married Alma Fay Cutting of nearby Bloomington in June 1919. Mrs. Dunn, then 35, was pregnant within months; just after the Dunns' enumeration in the 1920 Federal census taken in Bloomington on January 7, they departed for Los Angeles. Apparently having accumulated considerable capital in the cutlery trade, Mr. Dunn became part of the development of the Palms district and Culver City alongside Harry Culver. He became one of the five original directors of the First National Bank of Culver City when it was organized on July 1, 1920; that March 1920 he'd begun construction of a seven-room house for his family in his 42-lot Dunn's Boulevard Square tract in Palms bisected by Dunn Drive. (His house, demolished in 1963, was on the west side of Hughes Avenue just above Washington Boulevard; the other side of Hughes for most of this block is within Culver City's corporate limits.) Frances Dunn was born on July 10, 1920. Abigail would arrive on February 16, 1922, Janet on May 27, 1923, and Adrienne on September 20, 1927, the day after Alma's 44th birthday. While Palms was no doubt a lovely young suburb of modest dwellings, it wasn't Hancock Park, to which the Dunns aspired and obtained when they acquired their lot there by early 1928
  • Termites and fungus appear to have been a problem for some Hancock Park houses, even recently built ones; on May 1, 1931, the Department of Building and Safety issued Mr. W.A. Dunn a permit for to remove and replace unspecified "floor joists, girders and studding damaged by fungus."
  • It is unclear as to whether fungus or dim prospects in the 1931 real estate market caused the Dunns to put 664 South June Street up for sale that year. An ad in the Times on April 16, 1931, offered "At a loss, my beautiful home of 13 rooms, 3-car garage and chauffeur's quarters." Among the houses rendered white elephants during the Depression, 664 was unsurprisingly still on the market 16 months later at "$25,000 under cost" and in November 1932: "Tremendous value as to price arrangement, construction; for sale by owner." It wasn't as though the Dunns had been ravaged by the economy and had to camp out in Griffith Park; on January 16, 1933, at the depths of the real estate market, Will A. Dunn was issued a permit for a nine-room house at 1319 Warnall Avenue in the Comstock Hills neighborhood just west of the Los Angeles Country Club
  • 664 South June Street was sold during 1933 to retired Iowa-born insurance executive Harry Clay Pearson and his wife, née Ferne Hazelle Lee, a native of Sterling, west of Chicago. Twenty-six-year-old Ferne had been working as a stenographer there when she married 33-year-old Harry Pearson on New Year's Day 1921; the couple eventually settled in Chicago, from which they began to spend winters in Los Angeles. Childless, the couple traveled extensively, peregrinations that culminated in an 5,000-mile safari that they filmed, had edited by a professional cutter, and released for public viewing as African Holiday. The documentary was said to have been inspired by the Pearsons' skepticism over jungle scenes in Hollywood films that were shot in places such as Tijuana and Arcadia with heavily made-up white actors; the realism of African Holiday was noted in the press as being of great interest to mainstream studios. Calling it a "plotless safari," Time magazine described the film as recording "hazy shots of cheetahs, lions, tigers, giraffes, antelopes, elephants, hippopotamuses, assorted naked savages, waving grass. Goriest scenes are young Masai tribesmen sucking up the blood of a dead bullock, black coolies scooping out elephant feet to make wastebaskets for the U.S. market. Cinematic Afrophiles will relish the rare, sleek okapi, a herd of sunbathing hippos, the giant Latukas whose hunters tower seven feet tall, and the mystic snake dance of the Mariari cult." There were many exotic animals shot, some literally by the Pearsons, as well as four-foot-tall Pygmies and tribes averaging seven feet tall




  • On January 16, 1934, the Department of Building and Safety issued Harry Pearson a permit to rearrange second-floor partitions and to add a bathroom, for which he'd hired no less than Sumner P. Hunt's firm to design
  • Hollywood seems to have cooled on the Pearsons, or they on it—or perhaps it was the animals they'd seen on their travels that drew them back to less surburban living than could be had in Hancock Park. Harry and Ferne left Los Angeles in 1940 to settle on a cattle farm south of Des Moines. After Mr. Pearson died suddenly on July 8, 1951, his obituary in The Des Moines Register referred to him as a "nationally known breeder and showman of registered Hereford cattle"; there was no mention of African Holiday and, apparently, no mention of his demise in the west coast press
  • Reflecting the toll of the Depression on the exuberance of 1920s Hancock Park real estate values, ads for 664 South June Street ran in the Times in April 1940: "Cost $75,000! Now less than half. Owner leaving. Exquisite modern home. Lg. grounds." The house was soon sold
  • Cotton-industry executive Edwin Alexander McDonald was the owner of 664 South June Street by midsummer 1940. Born in Oakland on New Year's Day 1883, McDonald grew up in Houston, where his Canadian-born father worked as a Southern Pacific construction engineer; Edwin's brother Angus McDonald Jr. would grow up to become president of that railroad. Edwin married Nebraska-born Rose Alice Brett in Houston on February 26, 1911. After their son Edwin Jr. was born in San Antonio in December 1916, the McDonalds relocated to Los Angeles by 1920, renting first at 1621 West 24th St; son Angus John arrived that October, with Rose Mary turning up in November 1922. The McDonalds remained renters until moving to 664 South June; after 24th Street, they moved progressively farther west along the West Adams corridor, first to 2524 Eighth Avenue, then 1757 Buckingham Road. It was from Lafayette Square that the family moved to Hancock Park
  • On August 2, 1940, the Department of Building and Safety issued E. A. McDonald a permit to add a 13-by-19-foot second-floor room to the rear of 664 South June Street
  • Edwin McDonald Jr., a corporal in the Army Air Forces who'd received his high school, undergraduate, and law degrees from Loyola, married Marlborough and U.C.L.A graduate Barbara Jeane Mauerhan at St. Paul's Catholic Church on June 26, 1943. Six-foot "Scotty," as the groom was known, had been a Loyola basketball star in college. Passionate about the sport, he returned to the school when he was appointed head basketball coach in August 1946 and continued in the position until 1952, resuming his law practice full-time afterward
  • Archbishop John J. Cantwell officiated when Rose Mary McDonald married Army Air Force Lieutenant Thomas Joseph McGarry at St. Paul's on April 29, 1943; McGarry's parents lived just down Buckingham Road from the McDonalds' former home. A reception at 664 South June followed the ceremony
  • Edwin A. McDonald Sr. was still living at 664 South June Street when he died on December 16, 1954, following a heart attack. He was a few weeks shy of his 72nd birthday and had retired from the cotton firm of Anderson, Clayton & Company, which had grown into the largest cotton supplier in the world, with an international array of gins and oil mills
  • The McDonald family appears to have retained 664 South June Street until after Rose Brett McDonald died at 93 on March 26, 1981. Scotty McDonald had died at 55 nine years before having suffered a heart attack as he exited the steamroom at the Los Angeles Athletic Club. The house was on the market by November 1981 at an asking price of $585,000
  • Real estate broker Brenda Thayer appears to have acquired 664 South June Street in the 1990s. The house was on the market again in the summer of 1998 asking $1,510,000; it was still for sale the following spring, asking $1,495,000. By early 2001, 664 became a project of passionate and exacting preservationist Brett Waterman, whose television series Restored would begin running in 2017. Waterman's restoration of the house included the addition of a backyard pool


Illustrations: Private Collection, IMDB