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Nancy and I had looked for a home for a long time, harboring the fading hope that we could find something affordable in a city where the process of purchasing a house has come to demand the instincts of a piranha. One Sunday afternoon of open houses about two years ago, we stepped into a small house on the Westside, walked through its living room/dining room to the kitchen, and looked out at its courtyard patio. “I like this,” whispered Nancy. It was her birthday, and I said, “OK--but if we buy it, you’re not getting any other presents.”

The house was unoccupied, and the sole overt and personal evidence of the previous owner was hanging behind glass, framed in wood, on a bare living room wall--a half-century-old city form requesting a building variance for an addition. In neat printing on the form, the owner, whose first name was Charles, wrote that the addition “will provide adequate kitchen and sleeping for a family of 6 now sleeping in two bedrooms.... Family cannot afford a larger lot and house.”

For me, that brown, brittle paper hanging on the wall begged the question: What lives had been lived in this now empty home? It hadn’t occurred to me that this was something I’d be asking when buying a house. But that piece of paper--revealing the obvious but overlooked truth that people put themselves into their houses and leave traces of themselves behind--left me wanting to know more.

The first fact I learned intrigued me. Charles was both the original owner and the only owner of the house for more than 60 years. His family was selling because Chuck, as he was better known, had died several months earlier. When our bid was accepted over another’s, it was, we were told, because we were a family. As one of Chuck’s sons later told us, he liked the idea of the house once more having children in it. I peppered him with questions about the house and his father, and a few weeks later he gave us a copy of the original deed and a photograph of the house when it was first built.

Chuck and his wife bought the lot in March 1939, then chose a basic floor plan. The original 900-square-foot house had, from today’s perspective, the astonishing sale price of $3,195. They paid an additional $90 for a fireplace, $5 for two extra electrical outlets and $10 for another window.

The July 1939 photograph of the completed house shows a view to the east with nothing but fields. In the year the world went to war, the Westside of Los Angeles was more fields than families. And more white than ethnically diverse. The original deed stated that the property “shall not be sold or conveyed to any person other than one of the white or Caucasian Race.” This was the only thing about the house’s past that made me blanch. Six and a half decades later, the immediate neighbors are Iranian American, Egyptian American and African American.

I learned that Chuck made the place more his own when he got his variance, doing the bulk of the work on the addition himself. Well, not exactly. Chuck’s son told us that after his father had marked the outline of the addition’s foundation, he gave his three boys shovels and told them to start digging.

As we prepared the house to move in, I found myself thinking a lot about Chuck and looking with respect at the effort and creativity he put into his home. There were things we changed, but I felt compelled to preserve parts of his handiwork. We did upgrade some floors, windows, lighting and the heating system. And, like Chuck, we put the family to work. My daughter and her uncle cut new molding and the rest of us helped to install it. But we admired the home’s basic layout that Chuck’s family had conceived over backyard lunches, with plans sketched on paper napkins, and we did not change it.

I thought Chuck would be pleased that we kept the solid pine kitchen cabinetry that he built, and I cleaned up the original wrought-iron hinges and reinstalled them. In the breakfast nook was a casement window that lacked a metal crank. Poking about in the garage, I found several boxes of casement hardware--dusty but never used--and installed the crank on the window. It gave me satisfaction to finish a little job Chuck never got to.

Because of my own forays into film and TV work, I felt another connection to Chuck. For most of his life, he worked at MGM, first as a script clerk and later as an editor. I loved the story told by Chuck’s son of how he once telephoned his wife and told her to hurry over to Musso & Frank in Hollywood, where he was having lunch with “friends.” She didn’t bother to change out of her house clothes or fix her hair--a decision she regretted when she arrived at the restaurant and found her husband sitting with, among others, Clark Gable.

My curiosity piqued, I spent several hours at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences library. The one film I found that officially credits Chuck as the editor was called “Separate Tables,” released in 1958. Two of its actors walked away with Oscars.

In a city where the history of big places is often ignored, the history of small places is invisible. But not this small place. Not to me. This house feels right not only because the layout works, and there’s enough space that my children have their own rooms. The house also feels right because I know something of its history and it touches me. It had been one family’s home--children played here once and children play here again. The house feels right because it had an owner who lovingly shaped and cared for it--and also cared for those around him. This house was home to a man who, until his late 80s, frequently ambled over to neighbors’ homes, toolbox in hand--handyman-in-residence. There are times now when I could use him.

On the day we closed escrow, we went to the house to pick up the keys. We smelled a gas leak as soon as we walked in, and Chuck’s son--in a final act of responsibility for the family home--led my son and me underneath the house to find the source and close it up. Afterward, we sat on the patio to talk. “It must seem strange,” I said, “coming here knowing that the house is passing out of the hands of your family.” He didn’t answer directly, but as we talked his eyes drifted around, taking in the place one last time.

I later realized the comment was as much for me as it was for him. These walls already hold memories for us. But although the house remains in one place, time doesn’t. My children grow and change, and one day they will leave to enact the adult chronicle of their lives. The house will pass to others. When that happens, a part of me will remain, as Chuck has, adding silently to the past of this place.