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  • Built in 1925 on Lot 174 in Tract 6388
  • Original commissioner: Chisholm, Fortine & Meikle (Alexander D. Chisholm, William H. Fortine, and Evan L. Meikle) as a speculative project
  • Architect: Clarence J. Smale
  • On October 3, 1925, the Department of Buildings issued Chisholm, Fortine & Meikle permits for an 11-room residence and a 1½-story, 21-by-38-foot garage at 637 South Hudson Avenue
  • 637 South Hudson Avenue was being advertised for sale by California Properties Inc. in the spring and summer of 1926 at an asking price of $85,000 ($1,425,350 in today's currency)
  • Retired real estate operator Thomas Gaynor and his wife, Mary, were the first to occupy 637 South Hudson Avenue. The Gaynors were moving from Windsor Square, where, after arriving in Los Angeles from Chicago for Mr. Gaynor's health, they had been the first to occupy 405 South Irving Boulevard, which had been built as a speculative project in 1919. Their daughter Helen Frances and her husband, attorney Charles C. Cirese, also moved in after their marriage in Chicago on October 22, 1919; a large picture of Helen appeared in the The Chicago Daily Tribune the next day, although, curiously, Illinois marriage records indicate that the Cireses had been married in May 1917 before he went overseas with the Navy. At any rate, their daughter Mary Jane was born in Los Angeles on August 14, 1920. The Cireses' marriage soured fairly quickly, with Charles returning to Chicago (possibly for a time with his wife and daughter) where his large Italian-American family, including eight siblings, had been long settled; after divorce came in 1927, 405 South Irving was sold, Helen moving with Mary Jane and her parents to 637 South Hudson Avenue
  • Thomas Gaynor died of cancer of the stomach at 637 South Hudson on March 15, 1930. Perhaps to spare her daughter the sadness of her father's last days, Helen moved with Mary Jane and a maid temporarily to an apartment on South Sweetzer Avenue, where she was enumerated in the 1930 census though listed in the city directory at 637 South Hudson; only Mrs. Gaynor was counted at 637 when the census-taker came a month after her husband's death
  • Helen Cirese remarried; on November 16, 1932, she and William Edward Heffernan tied the knot in a small ceremony at 637 South Hudson Avenue. It appears that the newlyweds might have lived on Sweetzer while sending Mary Jane to live with her grandmother, where the latter two were counted at 637 in the 1940 Federal census. Mary Jane was married to Lieutenant Robert Eugene Merrin on September 20, 1944, the home ceremony taking place at 637 South Hudson owning to, according to the writeup in the Times that day, the ill health of Mrs. Gaynor. The Merrins would live in Westwood and would have four children; Mary Louise Popp Gaynor died at home on May 21, 1947, at the age of 82   
  • After the death of her mother, the Heffernans decided to move into 637 South Hudson Avenue. Helen Heffernan was active in civic affairs and regularly hosted at 637 gatherings such as luncheon and sewing meetings of the League for Crippled Children. Among the non-philanthropic parties given by the Heffernans at 637 was a Christmas cocktail-buffet in 1948, the invitations for which, per breathless Christy Fox of the Times, featured "Gayly turbaned blackamoors." The house was actually too big for the Heffernans at their stage of life; in mid 1950 they moved to 259 South Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, selling 637 to a car dealer whose profile would grow considerably in another 15 years
  • Of 1/32 Chicksaw blood, Holmes Paul Tuttle was born on June 17, 1905, in the settlement of Tuttle in the Chickasaw Nation two years before Oklahoma statehood, the recently established town having been named for Tuttle's rancher father. Though not exactly escaping poverty, Holmes went to work as a teenager stocking shelves at Ford Motor Company's Oklahoma City parts depot. In 1926 he hopped a freight for Southern California and found work at a Ford agency. Over time proving his worth to the company and having secured the capital, Ford awarded Tuttle a dealership of his own, which opened at 7122 Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles on April 29, 1946, just as postwar automobile production was ramping up new cars that were barely restyled '42 models. Whatever their offerings looked like, a new-car dealership was a gold mine with returning GIs setting up households at the beginning of yet another of Los Angeles's boom eras, which had always made it easy for men such as Tuttle to appear to be business whizzes, personal drive aside. An early auspicious sale out of his new dealership was a Ford coupe to B-list actor Ronald Reagan, who was then married to actress Jane Wyman. Another man capitalizing in a serious way on the postwar boom was Justin Dart, whose acquisition of the Rexall drugstore chain led him to become one of those semifamiliar California businessmen corralled by Tuttle to support Tuttle's idol Ronald Reagan, who was by then more of a television pitchman, into the governorship and presidency. Tuttle and Dart and the rest of Reagan's Kitchen Cabinet, believers in both up-from-the-bootstraps and inheritance, were savvy and fervent; having advertised Rexall widely on TV and radio, Dart in particular understood their power to project a manipulated image right into the minds of Americans through screens, just as the internet has done even more malignantly in recent times




As seen advertised in the Los Angeles Times on April 28, 1946;  Holmes Tuttle
Ford has through the efforts of the founder's son Robert and grand-nephew James Click
Jr. evolved over 75 years into Tuttle-Click, an operation with 15 dealerships representing 13
makes in California and Arizona. The image below depicts the original Los Angeles
dealership at 7122 Beverly Boulevard with a 1946 Ford Fordor sedan out front.


 
  • Meanwhile, Holmes Tuttle was just another prosperous car dealer attracted to the air of arrival inherent in the houses of Hancock Park, particularly those of ersatz baronial English design such as 637 South Hudson Avenue. He and his wife Virginia were settled at 637 by the fall of 1950, having moved from Pasadena, cutting Holmes's commute to the store considerably. Much as Helen Heffernan had, and as many local upper-middle-class matrons did, Virginia Harris Tuttle hosted meetings at home for various civic and charitable organizations—coming into her own, per her 1995 Times obituary, as a cofounder of L.A.C.M.A. and of the Music Center. Among the Tuttles' private events held at 637 was one for the family of property developer Homer Toberman, who lived in Hancock Park at 120 South June Street. In an era of mass travel, bon voyage parties seem quaint now but were popular in the stultifying '50s; the invitations for the one the Tuttles threw somewhat redundantly at 637 for Toberman, his wife Lucy, and their children in June 1953 before a trip to Hawaii read "Tuttle's Tropical Treat for the Tuttles," with "Hawaiian music, refreshments, and decor," just what you'd need before a trip to Hawaii. In his Times "Skylarking" column, James Copp, another breathless social diarist, further wrote that "the lovely hostess herself wore a bright green tropic-trim dress." So fun!
  • The Tuttles married in 1934 and had two children. Robert Holmes Tuttle was seven when the family moved into 637 South Hudson. He would grow up to become president of his father's Holmes Tuttle Ford and of Beverly Lincoln-Mercury, which opened in September 1955, and perhaps unsurprisingly, given his family's money via a growing empire of automobile dealerships and growing political connections—so much for making it on your own—ambassador to the U.K. during the second Bush's second term. Sally Lou Tuttle, who had been born on July 20, 1935, married Boone Gross Jr. at St. James' Episcopal Church a week and a day after her 21st birthday, with a reception afterward in the garden of 637 South Hudson. Mr. Gross's father was president of the Gillette Safety Razor Company
  • Per the Southwest Blue Book, Holmes and Virginia Tuttle were still living at 637 South Hudson Avenue in 1973. They had remodeled the kitchen two years before; it is unclear as to when the Tuttles left 637, bit it appears to have been by 1977. They were living in Montecito when Holmes died on June 18, 1989


Walter and Carole Karabian (she a.k.a. Carole Wells) as seen in Los Angeles Times coverage at
the time of the hijacking of Japan Air Lines flight 472 to Bangladesh in September 1977.


  • Attorney and politician Walter J. Karabian and his actress wife Carole Wells appear to have acquired 637 South Hudson Avenue by 1977. Married earlier that year, the couple was on a 'round-the-world honeymoon in September 1977 and aboard a Japan Air Lines DC-8 when it was hijacked to Dacca, Bangladesh, by the Japanese Red Army after leaving Bombay. Tense negotiations with the hijackers ensued at Dacca, the Karabians and other captives eventually being released. Born in Shreveport in 1942, Wells had made appearances in many television shows including Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, Perry Mason, and National Velvet and in movies including Funny Girl. Her previous husband was Edward Laurence Doheny IV, great-grandson of the oil tycoon, whom she'd married in 1963 (in a dress designed by Edith Head) and with whom she had two children. Somehow heavily in debt, Doheny committed suicide in 1973. Though she reportedly lost a pregnancy as a result of the hijacking trauma, Wells and Karabian would also have two children
  • The politics of 637 South Hudson had switched. As well as practicing law, Fresno-born Walter Karabian had been a progressive Democratic California assemblyman representing the 45th Assembly District—the west San Gabriel Valley, including Karabian's then home district of Monterey Park—from 1967 to 1974; he'd also sought nomination as California's secretary of state in 1974. The Karabians divorced in 1984, Carole eventually remarrying; Walter Karabian appears to have retained 637 South Hudson until at least 2017



Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT; Tuttle-Click