History of John Smith Griffin
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La Canada - 1947

My cousin, Tennyas Griffin, who first came down to California and stayed with us when we lived in Alhambra, lived in North Hollywood and worked at Lockheed. He also dabbled in real estate and built and sold new homes. His builder was a bishop Bailey, bishop of the Burbank ward. Tenn thought that he could arrange for Bishop Bailey to build me a home. At that time lumber, hardware and many other things, including plumbing and electrical supplies were very difficult to obtain and only those builders with good connections were able to do much building. I went to see bishop Bailey and he thought that he would be able to build for us. The next thing was to find a lot.

We had a number of friends in Los Angeles - friends that we had known in Washington who had moved out there as well as those we had made when we were here in 1940 to 1942. Among our Washington friends were Jerry and Olive Smith, Goldie and Melba Larson, Jack and Thell Henrickson, and Joe and Ruth Rich. The Rich's had just built a home in La Canada and were very pleased with the location. They went there primarily because of Ruth's asthma. Nephi Anderson, who was then in the Stake Presidency of the Burbank Stake built their house for them and they seemed to be very satisfied. We. were very anxious to live near someone we knew and as I liked the La Canada location very much.

I went to see Brother Anderson about building me a home. He told me that he was about to build a subdivision just a few blocks above the street on which Joe and Ruth Rich had built and that he would be happy to build us a home in the subdivision. It was impossible to make decisions with Dorothy in Berkeley and me down in Los Angeles, so we made arrangements for Dorothy's mother to stay with the kids, and Dorothy came down for a few days so that she could see Ruth and Joe's home and talk to brother Anderson. The subdivision that Brother Anderson was contemplating was that of an 82 acre estate which he was in the process of purchasing. It was in oranges and lemons and he was going to keep a couple of acres on which was located a big beautiful home with a swimming pool, and was going to divide the rest into building lots on two dead-end streets.

At the time I first talked to Brother Anderson, the deal had not gone though for the purchase of this estate but by the time Dorothy came down, it had been completed and the Andersons were just moving in. We went up to see them and went swimming in their pool. Brother Anderson had a plat of the subdivision with the lots all marked out. We were the first that were interested to the point of buying a lot and so had first choice. One of the primcipal persuaders in our deciding to go ahead with Anderson's subdivision was the fact that he owned several duplexes in Burbank and told us that one of them would be vacant in June or July and that we could rent it while he was building our home. With the prospect of getting the family down in Los Angeles we decided to go ahead, although we did not know at that time where the money would come from to build the house.

One day at work, shortly after Dorothy's trip down to Los Angeles I received in the mail a letter from the man from whom we had purchased our home in Berkeley saying that he had $10,000 that he would like to loan and wanted to know if I would like to borrow it at 5% interest, the same interest I was paying him on the home in Berkeley. It was like manna from heaven. So we had $10,000 of what we needed. The money from the down payment and other payments we had made on the home in Berkeley, together with all the savings we could scrape together and a loan of $1500 from Dorothy's mother (from life insurance and the estate left by her father) seemed to be just barely enough to build the house we wanted.

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