In Part III of an ongoing series highlighting some of the oldest homes in Hermosa Beach, The Beach Reporter this week features three houses with three very distinct histories all located near Pacific Coast Highway on First Street, 24th Place and Rhodes Street

Elsie Rafter lives at 536 24th Place, a house she once shared with her late husband, Eric, and her two daughters. Rafter has lived in the house since 1946 after the family migrated from the East Coast. Eric Rafter operated his own law firm near the corner of Pier Avenue and Monterey Boulevard for 40 years.

“I grew up in Massachusetts and spent 13 years working as a nurse in New York City. My husband was a lawyer and the former president of the Bar Association,” she said. “When we first bought the house, we were only planning on living there for two years because the place was such a dump, but I guess we forgot to move.”

Rafter’s house is another home built long before the city kept records of building permits. The house’s estimated building date is placed sometime just before or after the turn of the century. Records on the owners of the house first surface in 1913 as the home of A.S. and Sarah Hughes. The house’s address shifted many times over the years from h.s.s. (home south side) 24th Place to 646 24th Place to 544 24th Place.

Since A.S. Hughes shared the same name and similar physical attributes as Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes who served as chief from 1930 to 1941, he was rumored to be his brother. However, Charles Hughes — who was once the governor of New York, a presidential candidate in 1916 and secretary of state from 1921 through 1924 — was an only child.

Rafter recalled when many of the lots around the house were once just sand dunes.

“I remember those dunes because my kids lost their shoes in them,” she said. “It’s been a fun place to live, being near the ocean where we only had to run up and down a hill and we were at the beach. We came out here after my husband returned from Europe after the war (WW II). Back in those days, no hotels would take people with kids unless you were only staying one night, so we traveled up and down the coast looking for something. One day my husband told me he met a man who told him he was a Realtor and had a house for sale in Hermosa Beach. I told him to buy and he told me it was a dump but I said I didn’t care, we needed a place to live.”

According to “Castles on the Sand,” Georgia Lee Jones, owner of 715 First St., believes this house was once part of the old Hotel Redondo building. Hotel Redondo opened in 1890 and closed its doors in 1924.

The Jones family has lived in the house for more than 50 years. Jones’ father, Glen Bradshaw, bought the house in 1938. The family believes the house first became an ocean-front property, and served as the first hotel and post office in Hermosa Beach. They believe it was later moved to its current location. There are no building permit records for this house. The Jones family also rented out rooms to visitors.

Bill and Nancy Lyle currently own the house, and bought it nine years ago from Jones who now lives in Redondo Beach.

The five-bedroom, three-story house sits on a big lot that seems to be a rarity in Hermosa Beach. The Lyles converted the attic into a game room for his kids, and transformed the porch facing the backyard into a computer room and a laundry room.

Bill grew up in Hermosa Beach on Seventh Street and wanted to raise his family of five (two boys and three girls) in the same city.

“We are the second owners of this house, and we looked at it and loved it because it was so big,” said Lyle. “We remodeled the bathrooms that still had the original claw-foot bathtubs. We also replaced all of the plumbing, the electrical and put in central heating because the house had only one heater.”

According to the book “Castles on the Sand,” 2002 Rhodes St. is a house located just east of Pacific Coast Highway near the corner of 20th Street. This home is known as the “Ma Kennedy House.” Patricia Gazin, author of the book, states the house “caught plenty of incidental spotlight during the stormy years Evangelist Reverend Kennedy publicly quarreled with her daughter, the internationally acclaimed Aimee Semple McPherson.”

In 1922, McPherson founded the Foursquare Gospel, a Pentecostal mission in Los Angeles, and from that time was L.A.-based. She quickly attracted a huge following and generated a great deal of publicity with her lively meetings. In 1923, she dedicated the large circular church, the Angelus Temple in Echo Park. Its $1.5 million cost was funded by donations. In 1926, McPherson disappeared while swimming near Venice Beach and 32 days later, wandered out of an Arizona desert. She claimed that she had been kidnapped, tortured, drugged and held for ransom in a shack in Mexico. Police soon noted that her shoes showed no sign of a 13-hour hike and the shack in question could not be found. In support of her story, there had been threats against McPherson’s life in the previous year, and a plot to kidnap her had been foiled in September 1925.

Kennedy permanently moved into the beach cottage in 1931 after a fight with McPherson over management and money of the Angelus Temple. The matter made headlines when Kennedy invited reporters over to her modest Hermosa Beach house for a press conference July 4, 1932, to set the record straight related to her marital and family problems.

Following McPherson’s death in 1944 from an overdose of barbiturates, her daughter Roberta Slater went to live at her grandmother’s house in Hermosa Beach. In November of 1947, Kennedy was found dead in her kitchen.

The current resident declined to be interviewed.