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  • Built in 1925 on Lot 41 in Tract 5640
  • Original commissioner: electrical-supplies wholesaler Charles Emerson Listenwalter
  • Architect: Arthur B. Benton
  • On March 23, 1925, the Department of Buildings issued C. E. Listenwalter a permit for a 12-room house incorporating a two-car garage entered on West Fourth Street
  • Charles Listenwalter and his wife, née Ruby Daisy Weller, were married in Los Angeles on July 29, 1899; their son Ward Emerson Listenwalter arrived the following March 27. Daisy, as she was called, was a daughter of local hardware merchant and pioneer oilman Zachariah Weller, who, having purchased plans of Tennessee architect George Franklin Barber's Design No. 56, built a dazzling example of it in Angelino Heights in 1894. (This house still stands at 824 Kensington Road; another example of a local Barber design is at 1141 West Adams Boulevard.) Charles Listenwalter's family, based in Chicago, appears to have been in the habit of wintering on Southern California, he attending Los Angeles High School; at the time of his son's birth he was a law student in Chicago. Once Ward was old enough to travel, Daisy took him to Chicago to join her husband; the Listenberges' daughter Irene was born there on May 12, 1902. Daisy and the children appear to have spent a good deal of time with her parents in California before Charles himself settled in Los Angeles in 1910 and went into the wholesale electrical-equipment trade. Within a few years he partnered with Philip G. Gough to establish the Listenwalter & Gough Electrical Supplies Company. Irene died on April 10, 1914, when Daisy was six months pregnant; Shirley Listenwalter was born on July 20


As seen in the "The Radio," a weekly supplement to the Los Angeles Evening Express
on April 23, 1925: Listenwalter & Gough came to specialize in radio; here the
firm was offering a Zenith unit—exclusive of tubes and batteries, which
seems the equivalent of selling a car without an engine—for
the equivalent of nearly $6,100 in today's currency, a
price then as now within reach of owners
of big Hancock Park houses.


  • The Listenwalters appear to have been content to live with her mother in the old house on Angelino Heights until deciding to build 375 Rimpau Boulevard in considerably more modern and fashionable Hancock Park; Zachariah Weller had died in 1903. Ward Listenwalter, who had joined his father's firm, married dental assistant La Verna Gracer in November 1925; she died two years later. Shirley Listenwalter married Stephen M. Newmark of the pioneer Newmark family of Los Angeles, a salesman for the Zellerbach Paper Company, at 375 Rimpau on June 24, 1934. The marriage was over by the end of the decade, Shirley resuming her maiden name and returning to live with her parents at 375. In late May 1942 she eloped to Las Vegas with 43-year-old film producer Walter M. Morosco, son of the famous theatrical impresario Oliver Morosco. Their son Timothy was born on May 2 of the next year and the year after that the Moroscos divorced. Shirley once again returned home to 375 Rimpau Boulevard, this time with a baby
  • Charles Listenwalter retired from Listenwalter & Gough in 1928. Ward Listenwalter would remain purchasing agent for the firm for many years, even after it evolved into a company known as Gough Industries, Inc.; he lived with his parents and sister after the death of his wife though would be moving to San Gabriel after he remarried in 1950. On August 7, 1955, a news item in the Times reported that Charles and Daisy Listenwalter had recently celebrated their 56th anniversary on Catalina, the couple having "spent a large portion of their summers in Avalon" during their married life together. Mr. Listenwalter died just weeks later, expiring at home at 375 Rimpau Boulevard on September 15, 1955. Daisy Listenwalter remained at 375 into the 1960s with Shirley, whose third marriage, to Alfred Bovey Loller, took place in March 1957. (This union was apparently as short-lived as her first two.) It is unclear if Mrs. Listenwalter was still living at 375 Rimpau when she died in Los Angeles on April 6, 1967
  • Attorney George O. West was the next owner of 375 Rimpau Boulevard. Among the alterations to the house during his tenure were the construction of a retaining wall behind the garage portion of the house and the reinforcement of the low brick walls along Fourth Street (1969) and the addition of an 18-by-36-foot pool with a spa and a cabana attached to the east side of the garage (1985)
  • 375 Rimpau Boulevard was on the market in the spring of 1990 at an asking price of $2,650,000 and offered in classified advertisements, using typically grandiose real-estate-brokerese as the "Perfect home for stately entertaining and prestige living." The same come-on was being used in ads the following year with modest price reductions, which reached $2,395,000 by November 1991
  • The next owners carried out various interior remodelings and appear to have remained at 375 Rimpau until 2010 when the house was again on the market. An initial asking price of an even $4,000,000 in November 2010 reached $3,600,000 by the following June. By the end of the year it sold to the owner current as of 2022


Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT