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  • Built in 1925 on Lot 209 in Tract 6388
  • Original commissioner: Miriam B. Gude, wife of shoe-store owner Albert L. Gude
  • Architect and contractor: Koerner & Gage (Harry G. Koerner and William J. Gage)
  • On January 10, 1925, the Department of Buildings issued Miriam B. Gude permits for a two-story, 10-room brick-veneer residence and a two-story, 20-by-31-foot garage with a brick-veneered first floor and a half-timber-and-stucco second floor
  • Albert Lawrence (né Lorentz) Gude, born on November 21, 1878, in seven-years-new Birmingham, Alabama, would have recognized a boomtown when he read about it. His entreprenurial father William had moved his family to Cullman, midway between Birmingham and Huntsville and founded by German immigrants, where Albert opened a drugstore as a very young man. After William Gude died following a lingering illness on September 7, 1894, his widow and children made plans to move the the healthful west. Per Cullman's Alabama Tribune of August 29, 1895, "Mr. Albert Gude left yesterday for Birmingham, where he will join his sisters on their way to California. Albert was the last of the family to take his departure, and in his leaving goes one of Cullman's finest young men, one of whom no one could speak unkindly." The Gudes moved into the house still standing at 1239 Boston Street in genteel Angelino Heights; Albert Gude went to work selling shoes. In 1903 he married Massachusettes-born Miriam Barnes and opened his own shoe emporium at Third and Spring streets that would cater to the better class of foot


With business booming, Albert Gude expanded his business the year he built his new
house at 646 South Hudson Avenue. In time, he would add a Pasadena branch.


  • Gude's Good Footwear became a major player in the retail shoe trade in burgeoning Los Angeles. Albert and Miriam moved around town in the better neighborhoods as their family grew, with Kathryn arriving in 1906, Elizabeth in 1911, and William a year later. By 1914 the Gudes had left West Adams for a recently built nine-room house at 682 South Kingsley Drive—demolished in 1968—where they would remain until moving into 646 South Hudson Avenue. Even Wilshire district neighborhoods developed within the last 20 years, many of their houses, such as 682 South Kingsley, just a decade or so old, were becoming less fashionable among affluent Angelenos, for whom addresses west of Wilton Place would become essential
  • Elizabeth Gude married Edwin Ellsworth Ware quietly in 1929; she was turning 19 that year. Ware, 21, was a shoe salesman, perhaps at a branch of Gude's, or it may be that he went to work for the firm after the wedding. With his 17-year-old bride wearing green from head to toe, 18-year-old William Gude married fellow U.S.C. student Haila Bernice Stoddard of Beverly Hills in a family-only ceremony on October 31, 1931, at the Little Church of the Flowers at Forest Lawn, the youthful couple perhaps deriving dark amusement by marrying on Halloween in a cemetery. No child arrived by the next summer, as raised eyebrows might have expected, but perhaps not unexpectedly the marriage didn't last. Both Haila—now a New York stage actress—and William remarried in 1938, she to Jack Kirkland, author of the hit 1933 play based on Erskine Caldwell's steamy novel Tobacco Road (a third marriage and a third divorce ensued, as did a fourth marriage). William's marriage to Kathleen Kelsey lasted until her death in 1989. On October 9, 1932, Kathryn married David Goode of Pocatello at the Wilshire Methodist Episcopal Church with 500 in attendance; a wedding supper for 175 followed at 646 South Hudson
  • With Kathryn's wedding over, Albert and Miriam had to deal with a structural issue in their seven-year-old house. On November 11, 1932, the Department of Building and Safety issued Albert L. Gude a permit to remove and replace mud sills damaged by fungus
  • As the 1930s progressed, their nest now empty, the Gudes appear to have been ambivalent about staying at 646 South Hudson. The house was advertised for sale in late 1939; it was still on the market in early 1941. Ads at that time noted that it had cost $78,000 to build but that the owners would take the first $25,000 offered. Shadows of war and illness came; a year or so after Pearl Harbor, Albert took sick. He would enter the private Las Encinas Sanitarium in Pasadena, where he was to live for rest of his life. His malady is unclear, but given the mission of Las Encinas—advertised as "A Place for the Treatment of Nervous and General Diseases"—he may have had a breakdown or perhaps suffered from something more along the lines of Alzheimers; at any rate, he died at the hospital on December 15, 1947, at the age of 69. A news-item obituary with his picture appeared in the Times the next day
  • Miriam Gude remained at 646 South Hudson Avenue until late 1951, when, that summer, the house was again put up for sale. She was moving to the Bryson apartments down on Wilshire Boulevard, owned at the time by actor Fred MacMurray
  • Attorney William Denzil Campbell purchased 646 South Hudson Avenue from Miriam Jude and moved in with his wife, née Jane Burkholder of San Marino, and their three sons by 1952. The Campbells had been renting 22 Chester Place, a 1901 house that, like the rest of the residences of Chester Place, had been acquired by the rapacious Doheny family. Doheny acquisitions were generally rented out to various family operatives or other useful professionals; it is unclear if Campbell was among these, in his time working for Estelle Doheny, widow of the legendary Edward, as she acquired property and possessions and even the aura of ersatz royalty, which came with her elevation to Papal countesshood in 1939, crown and all. Perhaps Campbell handled all the boring details pertaining to the countess's collecting habits. In any case, he would have been vetted thoroughly in order to become a Doheny tenant; while he wasn't a Catholic, he was very active in the local Episcopalian hierarchy, among his positions being chairman of the Presiding Bishop's committee on Laymen's work in the diocese of Los Angeles as well as a senior warden at the Protestant old guard's St John's Episcopal Church just down the street from Chester Place and kitty-corner to Doheny-built St. Vincent de Paul Church, known by some wags as the "Church of Holy Oils." Crossing the street in terms of creed, Estelle Doheny was reportedly a contributor to the building of the current sanctuary of St. John's, built in 1924
  • Missouri-born William Campbell, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for Congress to represent the San Francisco Peninsula's 14th District in 1932, '34, '36, and '38, didn't give up even after moving south to Los Angeles. From there, he tried again in the 1944 14th District race, losing to Helen Gahagan Douglas. He seems to have decided to stick to his private law practice at his Spring Street office. Campbell had maintained a farm back in the Ozarks on which he died of a heart attack the day after Thanksgiving in 1961. Jane and the boys weren't with him that weekend. While he was buried in the Campbell family plot in Missouri, a requiem eucharist was held for Campbell in Los Angeles at St. John's on December 10. Jane Campbell died in 2001 and was buried in San Diego
  • Born in West Virginia in 1921 to a coal miner and shopkeeper of Lebanese origin, self-made insurance billionaire George Joseph founded Mercury Insurance after many years with Occidental Life. After serving as a B-17 navigator during the war, he married his wife Gloria in 1946 and entered Harvard on the G.I. Bill, graduating in three years. Back in Los Angeles, the couple lived early on at the still-standing La Mae apartments down on West 45th Street just east of Western Avenue, George going to work as an analyst and tireless salesman for Occidental. The founding of Mercury Insurance in 1962 called for a new house in a neighborhood Joseph had long coveted, and 646 South Hudson Avenue became available that year. The Josephs added a 18-by-45-foot swimming pool to the rear of the property in 1963. After 39 years and five children together, the Josephs divorced, she, a vice-president of Mercury, receiving half of the marital assests, including 646 South Hudson, where she was still in residence in 2018. George Joseph had opened Mercury's first offices in a Miracle Mile building; in 1984, the year his divorce proceedings were underway, he cemented a foothold near Hancock Park when he built a new headquarters for Mercury at the southeast corner of Wilshire and the west entrance of Fremont Place, next to the one-time site of 4472 Wilshire Boulevard. After many years of a house here and there but lying mostly fallow save for uses such as Christmas tree sales lots, parcels lining Wilshire in the Park Mile had begun to be populated by condominiums and office buildings by the 1980s. George Joseph remarried soon after his divorce; he and his second wife Vicky Wai Yee, 30 years his junior, found another English-style house to move into at 365 South Hudson Avenue, just two blocks north of the first Mrs. Joseph at 646 


Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT