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  • Built in 1924 on Lot 28 in Tract 3819
  • Original commissioner: real estate executive Frank Ryan as his own home
  • Architect: Witmer & Watson (David J. Witmer and Loyall F. Watson)
  • On March 8, 1924, the Department of Buildings issued three permits to Frank Ryan pertaining to 555 Muirfield Road; the first was for a 16-room residence; the second for a 20-by-21-foot, 2-story garage ("private garage and servants quarters only—not rented to tenants"); the third for a 14-by-22-foot laundry building 
  • Frank Ryan, his wife Ruth, and their daughter Maude were joined at 555 Muirfield Road by her parents, General and Mrs. Mathew W. Muller, soon after moving into the new house. Mathew W. Muller was a Fresno grain farmer and merchant turned real estate developer there who was also a California National Guard commander, hence his honorific. He died in 1926; his widow and the Ryans would remain at 555 Muirfield Road until early 1934, the house perhaps then being rented out for a year if it didn't remain empty. Tragedy had begun to overwhelm the Ryans within weeks of the announcement in the Times (and in The Fresno Morning Republican) in early March 1929 of Maude's engagement to Payson Sumner Brown Jr., a salesman whose own father was in real real estate. Brown was killed on March 26 when the dilapidated World War I–era Curtiss Jenny he was piloting crashed near Montebello. After leaving 555 Muirfield, the Ryans rented 850 South Burnside Avenue, down the street from which Frank met his demise. On the evening of July 27, 1934, Maude was driving her parents when, apparently to avoid colliding with another car, she drove into a lamppost in front of 824 South Burnside. The falling post injured eight-year-old Stanley Silberman of 824, who was playing in his front yard; Frank Ryan died of his severe injuries at Methodist Hospital the next day. He was 52. It seems that he, Ruth, Maude, and Minnie had been planning to move to 322 South Plymouth Boulevard in Windsor Square, probably renting it as they had 850 South Burnside, but with the sudden change of circumstances, Ruth, Maude, and Minnie left the Plymouth Boulevard house in short order and began living in apartments. Minnie Muller died on December 7, 1939; Maude would never marry


As seen in the Los Angeles Times on March 27, 1929


  • Stockbroker Henry Marion Bateman bought 555 Muirfield Road in 1935, settling there after occupying in sequence 233 South Lucerne Boulevard in Windsor Heights and 357 North McCadden Place in Hancock Park. Henry had come to California after the Armistice, moving from a position in a San Antonio bank before the war to one in Los Angeles. He married Gladys Mann, a fellow native Texan, on June 14, 1924, in the house her parents were renting at 654 Crenshaw Boulevard. (Edward Mann was a Texas cattleman; his family would soon occupy 404 South Irving Boulevard.) Henry Bateman worked for the securities arm of Citizens National Trust & Savings Bank until forming his own company, H. M. Bateman & Company, in July 1933 with other former officers of the subsidiary. A year later, the firm became known as Bateman, Eichler & Company, with branches downtown and in Hollywood and Pasadena
  • Although it would take some time before the Batemans and the Manns climbed into the pages of the Southwest Blue Book, they became very well connected socially after their arrival in Los Angeles, with an embarrassing number of mentions in society pages and social diarists' columns over the ensuing decades. Banking was one way to crack the local establishment; Henry became a member of the California Club and the family of the Los Angeles Country Club. Gladys became active in the Junior League. Gladys's mother, Marilyn "Mallie" Mann, became a social dreadnought in her own right. When she died at 95 in 1970, a large obituary in the Times, which even included her picture, she was referred to as a "prominent pioneer of Los Angeles society," as if this was a major achievement; it could be that such seemingly overstated importance was due to the influence of her namesake granddaughter Marilyn, known as Missy (Gladys Bateman's sister Jane "Tootsie" Brant's daughter) on her husband Otis Chandler, who was the powerful publisher of the paper from 1960 to 1980. Very social too was the Manns' eldest son Hugh, who never married and lived with his mother on Irving Boulevard his entire life; he had received a similarly aggrandized and illustrated obituary in the Times in 1965
  • Henry and Gladys Bateman would remain at 555 Muirfield Road for 35 years. The only permitted alterations to the property currently on file at the Department of Building and Safety were their expansion of the garage in 1946 and kitchen alterations in 1950
  • Henry Bateman died on October 13, 1966, at the age of 74. His obituary in the Times was seriously understated in comparison with those of his mother-in-law and bachelor brother-in-law. His firm—now known as Bateman, Eichler, Hill Richards—continued. (In 1978, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Stock Exchange charged the firm with stock manipulation; it would be absorbed by Chicago-based Kemper in the early 1980s.) After Henry's death, Gladys Bateman moved to an apartment at 764 South Plymouth Boulevard, by the early '70s settling back north of Wilshire at 420 South Plymouth in Windsor Square. Blessed like her mother with longevity, she would die at 96 November 18, 1995, having outlived her husband by 29 years
  • Television star Dan Blocker, who was in the lucrative midst of the 14-season run of Bonanza, was the owner of 555 Muirfield Road by early 1968. Blocker and his wife Dolphia and their twins Debra Lee and Danna Lynn and sons David and Dirk were moving to Hancock Park from Northridge; the new house was much closer to Paramount, where Bonanza was filmed. Blocker appeared in 415 episodes of the show


Dan Blocker in his Hoss Cartwright guise with his family, circa 1963


  • On March 20, 1968, Blocker was issued a permit for a kitchen remodeling and other interior alterations; on April 10, he received a permit to add a 22-by-25-foot rumpus room to the existing poolhouse, which predated the June 7 issuance of a permit for the pool itself, one measuring 26 by 38 feet
  • Blocker died of a pulmonary embolism on May 13, 1972, following gallbladder surgery at Daniel Freeman hospital in Inglewood. He was 43. The Blockers, however, had put 555 Muirfield Road on the market the summer before. With no takers, it was auctioned off as the "Luxurious Home of TV Star Dan Blocker" on December 6, 1971


As seen in the Los Angeles Times
on November 25, 1971.


  • 555 Muirfield Road was next occupied by accounting-firm executive James D. McMenamin. Until 1978 McMenamin was the managing partner of the Los Angeles Group of Coopers-Lybrand (now part of PricewaterhouseCoopers). By 1978 he had formed McM Realty and become a property developer. The length of McMenamin's stay at 555 is unclear
  • In the fall of 1982, 555 Muirfield Road was utilized as a design showhouse by the Los Angeles chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers to benefit the cancer program at the California Hospital Medical Center. The house was on the market by the spring of 1982 for $995,000
  • Lawrence and Sandra Schwartz owned 555 Muirfield Road from the mid 1980s until 2000; the owner since then has added a streetside retaining wall and, in 2014, performed a major remodeling of the interior



Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT; Bonanza Boomers