Ruth

Setting up form for original slab for house on Landa Street

The story behind this picture, according to Bob in 2010: "This form work starting in August 1947 was for the 1964 Landa 20x25 foot house Ruth and I moved into in that December. Anecdote!...Neighbor Sam Lucas had disassembled the form shown while we were away at our jobs because he disapproved of it, and was helping us do it his way at the time this photo was taken. On week-ends Ruth and I stayed in an on-site tent, other nights we slept in my parent's house across town. I have no idea where this photo has been all these years!"

After framing

After siding, but before windows; note mailbox bottom left (about 15' from street)

Unremembered (Jimmy Olsen?), Don Stafford(Perry White?), dad (Clark Kent?), Emily White(Lois Lane?) on 4th floor of 205 South Broadway office of Mapping Division of LA County Surveyor

Marian's family about this time

"We did not date or go nightclubbing or to the beach, but we talked. I had about $1200, the car, and a place to stay and eat with my parents and was a serious student. I told Ruth she was the girl for me and that we could make plans.

Ruth lived in a rented room with her girl friend. The room was one of the rooms of a house owned by an old bachelor. The girls had kitchen priveleges and the old bachelor seemed to resent my presence.

Ruth had left her parents home while she was 17 years old. She was an intimate friend of a married couple of teachers at Compton Jr. College. These teachers had advised her to leave her family and come live with them. To avoid being forced to come home by her parents, also to change her name. Ruth changed her last name, Van Leersum, to Henson (perhaps the same as the married teachers). That was her name when we got married in August 1947. Ruth resisted my proposal of marriage until I did 2 things. In May 1947, I took a Civil Service exam for a job with L.A. County. Ruth and I drove around L.A. about that time looking for a building site. Our conversations led up to plans to use my $1200 to buy a lot and for both of us to get jobs and live together on my parents back bedroom while we worked together on weekends to build our own house.

Ruth had many friends. The Enq family were her neighbors. Dr. Enq had and office on 3rd and Spring Street in downtown L.A. As a requirement for a marriage licence, Dr. Enq took our blood samples. As payment for this service, he asked me to travel with him while he made house calls in several bad neighborhoods, as a sort of bodyguard. Dr. Enq had 6 kids and 4 cars.

My sister Marian and her husband Frances Rupp had been building their own house. Ruth's brother Gerard had built his own house. We could do it.

One day in June 1947, I rode my bicycle from South Los Angeles to Marian's house. On this bike ride, I passed Landa Street and Fellowship Drive and saw the FOR SALE sign. The same week I recieved notice that I had passed the Civil Service Exam. In August Ruth and I both started work, she as a 200 word/minute typist at Title Insurance. We bought the lot and started building. We were together earning $500/month, and worked Sat. and Suns. getting the permit and buying 1 board at a time, finishing the 450 sq. ft. house with a roof and windows, water connection and a dirt floor and moving in Nov 1947.

The couple had purchased a lot in the Silver Lake District of Los Angeles in the hilly terraine of Cerro Gordo. Ruth's roommate before marrying Bob was a witness at their wedding, along with her boyfriend. It was a court wedding. During the initial period of home-construction, on weekends, the couple camped in a tent on their home building site on Landa Street. The water meter was already installed, and they used a gasoline lantern to keep working into the night. Some days, after work, the couple would work until 10, sack out in the tent, and drive to Bob's parent's house at 312 E 91st to clean up before work.

After 3 months, they moved into the 450 square foot house on Landa Street, still using the gasoline lantern, and living on a dirt floor, and using an outside toilet. Scrap lumber was used to get up the hill without getting muddy shoes. For the next 5 years, they worked, earning about $500/month, and spending 20 hours a week making home improvements. Time was spent buying materials, porting them up the hill, hammering, sawing, mixing cement, building scaffolds, plumbing, wiring, etc.

The Courtship of Ruth Van Leersum:

My education and experience about girls was retarded. Family poverty directed me to help, starting early earning what I could doing jobs for neighbors such as were available to kids, like mowing lawns, peddling handbills ,selling newspapers on a street corner, all leaving little time for socializing. My parents required me to attend the Lutheran church every Sunday, culminating in my confirmation ceremony.

At 13, the reverend Carl Berner had instilled in me an ethic that said ”Prepare for your future marriage and family responsibilities by living a clean life”. That was my first reason for becoming an unsocial-workaholic night-school attendant, giving attention to job preparation, rather than the opportunities for fun and games. Thus I became employed in a responsible position and had my first serious involvement with an employee whom I supervised.

Robin’s artist’s life fascinated me and although I courted her, taking her places and having fun, my peculiar ethic overwhelmed her interest in me and she found another. One more basis of this retardation was the case of my virginity being drafted into the military life at the age of 23. Besides the complete isolation from femininity for almost 3 years, the indoctrination of the idea of chastity by Commander Gene Tunney (through a film) kept me out of whorehouses, as well as continuing the ideals of my father that I also abstain from nicotine and alcohol.

So after the war was over, and I found myself sitting next to the only girl in our calculus class, we helping each other with the homework, my strange platonic attitude may have distracted her attention from the 11 other schoolboys despite the 8-year difference in our ages.

I had taken and passed a County Civil Service examination and saw a way to propose marriage to Ruth. At the time, Ruth had absconded from her father's house some months previously and had obtained a job with a downtown title company, and she and another girl had rented a room together.

Conversations about the practicality of a marriage led to our shopping around for a piece of land, talking about slowly, with our weekend labor and talents, building a house with our combined earnings, then moving into the still unfinished house as soon as possible.

Her response to the proposal was also to regard the decisions as tentative, subject to termination if things did not work out. Another stipulation, which I agreed to, was to not have children until we were living with happiness, comfort and security. We had a civil marriage in August 1947, lived about 3 months in my parent's house.

I had $1000 in savings. We chose and bought the land, worked and built a house which was ready with a roof, window glass and plumbing, but with a dirt floor when we took up residence on Landa Stree in December. One other of my father's ideals was "Never borrow money". Perhaps this partly goes to explain the failure of our marriage in 1961.