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  • Built in 1924 on Lot 20 in Tract 5640
  • Original commissioner: builder Harry H. Belden for resale
  • Architect: Ray J. Kieffer
  • On February 9, 1924, the Department of Buildings issued Harry H. Belden permits for an 11-room house and a 20-by-30-foot garage at 624 Rimpau Boulevard
  • Harry Belden, whose office was at Larchmont and Third, was advertising the completed 624 Rimpau for sale by August 1924
  • Insurance executive, mortgage banker, and real estate investor Robert Howard Parker bought 624 Rimpau Boulevard in 1925. Born in Philadelphia on June 24, 1873, Parker moved to Shanghai in 1895 to go into business there, becoming manager of the Shanghai Life Insurance Company, a British concern. He and his wife Mollie, born in Oroville in 1878, adopted a daughter, Betty, born in Oakland in 1913. Mrs. Parker was active in the expat community in Shanghai until her death in 1920; it was then that Robert Parker decided to return to the U.S., marrying Ethelyn Campbell in 1921 and settling in Los Angeles, where their daughter Ethelyn Bobette was born the next year. The Parkers rented 628 South Irving Boulevard in Windsor Square before moving to Rimpau Boulevard
  • On February 19, 1926, the Department of Building and Safety issued R. H. Parker a permit for 624 Rimpau to enclose a porch with glass
  • The Parkers left 624 Rimpau Boulevard by 1932, renting briefly 620 South Irving Boulevard before moving to Mansfield Avenue. They would divorce by 1936, Ethelyn opening a gift shop on Wilshire Boulevard. Robert Parker returned to China, where he would be imprisoned by the Communist government for a number of years before being released in 1955. (Remarried, he died in Torrance the next year at the age of 82)
  • After the departure of the Parkers, who may have retained ownership during the Depression, 624 Rimpau Boulevard was occupied by the families of carburetor manufacturer William L. Conzelman, retired New York hospital-supplies manufacturer William Graupe—in 1935 his family would move to 336 South June Street nearby and live there for 40 years—and Bessie Machris, a widow 
  • A curious permit issued for 624 Rimpau by the Department of Building and Safety on August 26, 1940, suggests that the façade's dramatically sloping northerly roofline was not part of the house's original architecture. The document authorized the creation of a 12-by-22-foot porte cochère at the northwest corner of the building, which brought the roofline a full story lower and served to balance the design. Also interesting is that the owner of the house was now the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company, suggesting that a foreclosure had taken place
  • Owning 624 from 1942 to 1954 was assistant film director Alan L. Kadden and his actress wife Dorothe Kellogg, who appeared uncredited in 1953's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
  • Banker Grant Leroy Bushee bought 624 Rimpau Boulevard in 1954. Bushee was one of six children of Grant Brayton Bushee, a physician, and his wife Mabel, all living in Buda, Illinois, in 1910, where Dr. Bushee was serving as postmaster. Things do not seem to have been going well at home for Roy Bushee and his older brother Gay, who by the spring of 1914 had been sent west to live with prominent Los Angeles banker Joseph Sartori and his wife Margaret. In the 1920 Federal census, the well-sponsored Bushee boys, who had already been mentioned with some frequency in social columns in the local press, were noted as "wards" of the Sartoris, who lived at 725 West 28th Street in West Adams (West 28th Street being referred to then as "Bankers' Row" before it evolved into U.S.C.'s Fraternity Row). By 1920 the boys' parents were separated, later to be divorced. The connection between the Sartoris and the Bushees is unclear, though the families may have known each other from early years in Iowa
  • Well established in Southwest Blue Book Los Angeles, Roy Bushee's name would appear continually through the years in social diarists' columns. A writeup of his wedding to Joan Bishop on July 11, 1939, claimed that it was "one of the most fashionable of the season" and that it "united two members of well-known families." The Bushees had a son, Grant Sartori Bushee, known as Skip, who was eight when the family moved to Hancock Park from Lafayette Square; their daughter Margaret Rishel Bushee, named after Mrs. Sartori and called Dodie, was then 13. Dodie's engagement to Charles E. Vandervoort of Newport Beach was announced prominently in the Times in August 1963 though the marriage does not seem to have taken place. On June 26, 1965, she married Edward Skibitzke at All Saints' Episcopal in Beverly Hills—where her parents had been married in 1939—with a reception following at 624 Rimpau Boulevard
  • On June 9, 1954, the Department of Building and Safety issued Roy Bushee a permit for a kitchen remodeling at 624 Rimpau Boulevard. On April 12, 1961, he was issued a permit for a 20-by-42-foot swimming pool and on May 10 authorization to convert part of the garage into a cabana
  • Owners of 624 Rimpau Boulevard since the early 1970 have carried out various interior remodelings; a two-story rear addition was built in 2007



Illustration: Private Collection