Whitley Heights 101

6722 Whitley Terrace

6722 Whitley Terrace was one of only twenty homes that were built in Whitley Heights during 1930s as the majority of them were built during the 1920s. This cape cod style home was built in 1936 by architect E. Leo Callahan for illustrator and artist Arnold Armitage. The 3 bedroom, 2.5 bathroom, 2,275 square foot home sits on a downslope, double lot on Whitley Terrace near the intersection of Milner Road. The first floor contains a living room, kitchen, dining room, one bedroom, one full bathroom and the garage. There are stairs leading down to the ground floor which contains a family room, library, another full kitchen, half bathroom and then two bedrooms separated by one full bathroom. There is a backdoor on the bottom floor that leads outside to a patio area and a 15 x 38 swimming pool which was built in 1958. Below is a photograph of the home shortly after it was built.

The architect, E. Leo Callahan (1901-1968) was responsible for building and designing several apartment complexes in the Wilshire District, including the historical designated Guntharp Apartments, 758 South Ardmore Avenue, which was built in 1930.

Arnold Armitage moved in with his wife, Kathryn Stubbs Armitage and in 1938, he remodeled the ground floor and converted the playroom into another bedroom and bathroom and added the kitchen so he could rent out the bottom floor. In 1941, Armitage took out an advertisement in the Los Angeles Times in order to rent the bottom floor for $70 per month.

Thirty-one year old Harry Soderquist rented the unit between 1941 and 1942 and made the news when he was scheduled for discharge from the US Army but records showed he was the youngest man in the Army- being age 12. Before Soderquist could be released, records needed to be confirmed regarding his true age. Soderquist denied being born in 1929 and was “in the unique position of being too old to stay in the army and too young to get out”. Eventually, he was discharged and became a masseuse while living in this Whitley Heights house.

Arnold Armitage (1899–1991) was a British-born artist and illustrator, best known for his work with pin-up art. He moved Hollywood, California, in 1925 and began working for the Foster and Kleiser Company, which produced billboards. By the 1930s, Armitage was known for his specialized billboards and for example, he designed the Bullock’s Department Store billboard below in 1935.

During the 1940s, Armitage turned to creating “pretty girl” paintings for the calendar market. His work is still sold at auctions today such as the one below:

The Armitages resided at 6722 Whitley Terrace until the mid-1940s. The house was sold to an automobile specialist named Albert Menasco and his wife, Juliet. Born in Los Angeles in 1897, Albert S. Menasco was a key figure in the design of airplane engines in the years between the two World Wars. A high school dropout in Los Angeles, he became a wing-walker on stunt airplanes. Rejected by the Army in World War I because of a hearing impairment, he became a civilian instructor in aircraft engineering for the Signal Corps at Langley Field, Virginia.

Menasco later began racing midget cars that he built himself, until a friend gave him some war-surplus airplane engines. He then started the Menasco Motors Corporation to modify the engines for commercial use. When his company he failed, he set out to design his own motors, and in 1929 he came out with the first of a series of in-line, air-cooled engines. His greatest success was in car racing, where he built high performance engines that won him many races. Menasco Motors began to specialize in landing gear, and the company would go on to build landing gear for the Space Shuttle. While he resided at 6722 Whitley Terrace, he owned a car dealership.

Menasco’s best friend was actor Clark Gable until Gable’s death in 1960. Menasco helped to console Gable after his wife, actress Carole Lombard, died in a plane crash in 1942. Below are MGM General Manager & Vice President, Edgar Mannix, Clark Gable and Albert Menasco in Las Vegas, Nevada to view the plane wreckage.

Menasco was the best man at Gable’s fifth and final wedding in 1955 to Kay Williams Spreckles. After the two were married in Los Angeles by a justice of the peace, the two set out for their honeymoon in Napa Valley where they stayed at Menasco’s vineyard called “The St. Helena Winery”. In 1976, new owners purchased the vineyard and it is now called “Marston Family Vineyard”. According to the website, there are stories about Menasco and Gable carousing on the property, riding tractors with whiskey sours in hand, while having target practice with the sound of gunshots echoing through the canyon late into the evening. Menasco remained at 6722 Whitley Terrace until 1950.

6722 Whitley Terrace was purchased by Jack and Nancy Fields after they married in 1957. Jack Fields was a theatrical agent who saw her perform in the theatrical part in “The Women” at the Hollywood Playhouse on Las Palmas and wanted to represent her. He had her change her stage name to “Whitney Blake” and dye her hair blonde. Then Fields married the divorced mother of three and they purchased this house in Whitley Heights. Prior to their marriage Nancy Whitley Baxter lived with her three children in a bungalow she got in her divorce, located at 921 Indiana Avenue in Pasadena as pictured below.

The Fields moved into the home with her three children: Richard, 13, Brian, 12 and Meredith, 10. Fields helped his wife start her television career and she made several guest appearances on shows such as “Mike Hammer”, “Perry Mason”, “Maverick”, and “Bonanza” before she got a recurring role as Dorothy Baxter in “Hazel” between 1961 to 1965. She is pictured below on the right, with Shirley Booth, who played the main character of Hazel.

Soon, Blake focused solely on her acting career; no pictures were ever taken of the family while they lived in Whitley Heights and none were ever hung up, so when the Fields entertained, no one knew there were three teenagers living there. Actor Ed Asner was a regular houseguest. Blake expected her children to call her by her stage name and her husband became the caretaker while she was off filming. Jack was a very controlling stepfather who would often use physical punishment on the children.

Meredith Baxter, who later became a television actress, recalls the house in her biography, “Untied : a memoir of family, fame, and floundering”: “we moved from our small South Pasadena bungalow on Indiana Avenue to a ritzy (for us) split-level hillside house at 6722 Whitley Terrace in the Hollywood Hills. It was unbelievable: We walked into the upstairs! In our new house, the master bedroom, kitchen, and dining room were on the top floor and the kid’s bedrooms and an elegant all-white living room and bar were downstairs. There was a big, sloped terraced yard and a view of the Hollywood Bowl parking lot. I remember my brothers and I went crazy when we first moved in… running up and down the yard steps . . . hiding in bushes . . . racing through the house . . . and getting lost. It was so much grander than the modest house we’d come from.”

Meredith Baxter also recalls her stepfather’s controlling behaviors. “When I neglected to clean my room properly, I lost it; I forfeited any right to enter it for a period of days or weeks. On those nights Jack had me sleep in the “den,” which was really part of the basement, a damp unfinished room built into the side of the hill; there were exposed overhead pipes and a dirt wall. I’d make a bed as close as possible to the door, bring in a lamp and a radio, and pray for daylight.”

“And there was Jack’s Home for Wayward Actors, a little guest room off our backyard where Jack would install clients who were between jobs. I’m not sure how the wonderful character actor Frank Silvera ended up there, but he was one of our more permanent residents.” Silvera was born in Jamaica and made over 80 guest appearances during the 1950s and 1960s on television shows including; “The Magical World of Disney”, “Hawaii Five-O”, “The Flying Nun”, “The Wild Wild West”, “Gunsmoke”, “Rawhide”, “Bonanza”, and “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour”. He also had several minor roles in films such as, “The Cimarron Kid”, “The Greatest Story Every Told” and “Mutiny on the Bounty”. In fact, while he lived in the guesthouse, Marlon Brando visited the house while they were filming “Mutiny on the Bounty”.

After both her brothers moved out, Meredith could not handle her stepfather’s controlling behaviors. In 10th grade, Meredith moved in with her father and attended James Monroe High on Sepulveda Blvd, but was homesick and returned home to finish 10th grade at Hollywood High School in 1962. She joined the drama department and began experimenting with LSD with her brother, Brian. Brian was living with friends his senior year while he attended Hollywood High School. In 1966, Meredith moved in with her boyfriend, Bob Bush, who worked part-time at Ralph’s Grocery Store. They rented a small apartment for $70 per month located at 8000 Honey Drive, just off of Laurel Canyon Road, pictured below.

Baxter married Robert Lewis Bush (both pictured below) in 1966 and they had 2 children, Ted and Eva, before they divorced in 1971. After they split up, her stepfather helped Meredith with her acting career.

Starting in 1971, Meredith appeared in minor roles in several television shows including, “The Partridge Family” before landing a role in the tv series “Bridget Loves Bernie” starring opposite David Birney from 1972 to 1973. Meredith married David Birney in 1974 and they had three children together before they divorced in 1990.

Back at 6722 Whitley Terrace, Jack and Whitney remained married until 1967 and Whitney remained in the Whitley Heights home. A year later, she married television writer Alan Cumings and they moved into a Beverly Hills home while she rented this house. The two created the sitcom, “One Day at a Time” a comedy about a single mother who was raising her two daughters. Whitney wanted she and Meredith to star in the television show, but CBS though they were too old for the characters so they settled on Bonnie Franklin, MacKenzie Phillips, and Valerie Bertinelli. The show lasted from 1975 to 1984. From 2017 to 2020, they re-created the show with 46 episodes. Between 1982 to 1989, Meredith Baxter, starred as Elise Keaton in “Family Ties” and then filmed many television movies during the 1990s and 2000s. After marrying and divorcing actor Michael Blodgett, Meredith married a woman named Nancy Locke in 2013.

Between 1967 and 1975, 6722 Whitley Terrace was used as a rental. One renter, Bari Silvern, made the news in 1973 when an anteater followed her into the house and she thought it was a friendly animal. When her son came home, he tried to find out what type of food it would eat, settling on water and pineapple yogurt. The Silverns wanted to keep the anteater as a pet and called animal control. Apparently, they did not think the anteater would make a good pet and Whitney Blake may have not wanted them to keep it in the house.

Blake also rented the house out to cinematographer Lee Garmes and his wife, former actress Ruth Hall. Garmes won the 1932 Academy Award for Best Cinematography in the film, “Shanghai Express” and also filmed the first third of the film, “Gone with the Wind” with director George Cukor, before Cukor was fired (both below on the set).

Blake sold 6722 Whitley Terrace in May of 1975 for $80,500 and for the first time since then, the house was put on the market for $1,.995 million in August of 2024. The house offers two rarities of Whitley Heights: an attached garage and a swimming pool. The house is also located directly in the middle of Whitley Heights and it’s movie industry history, including being located across the street from the homes of actor Eugene O’Neil and director Robert Vignola.

Below is the area of Whitley Terrace where is meets Milner Road taken during the 1920s. The empty lot across the street from these homes would eventually be where 6722 Whitley Terrace would be built in 1937. This photograph was taken from the property of 6733 Wedgewood Place. This area is the heart of Whitley Heights.