Sunday I went on a micro-tour of Echo Park history with Nancy Stone Bernard, an archeaologist who was raised in EP, and Nancy’s friend Joan Weber, who is an artist. The two have been close since childhood, attending Thomas Starr King Junior High together in the late 40s as well as Marshall High School (which was out of district for Nancy).

One of the things I was hoping to gain from a morning walking and driving the neighborhood (and visiting, it turned out) was more knowledge about ‘40s and ‘50s Communists and fellow travelers in Echo Park, which once was nicknamed Red Hill and Red Gulch by the people who lived here. But you really can’t have an agenda when it comes to someone else’s childhood, and so, what I found instead of Communists was a Russian film editor named Jack, his Echo Park-raised wife, Ludmilla, and a pair of dogs named Rasputin and Nicholas, as well as many fine nuggets of EP history.

In Nancy I found a lively, engaged woman who by nature seems oriented in the present – despite her own specialty in “lithics” or stone age technology. She contacted me after reading a review I wrote of the book “Bohemian Los Angeles,” which is about Silver Lake and Echo Park from the 1910s to the 1950s. She was particularly interested in Fellowship Park Way, which some of her parents’ friends had created, in honor of Ralph Waldo Emerson and, perhaps, Benjamin Mills of the Los Angeles Fellowship, a spiritual group modeled after the Ethical Culture Society.

In a walk to one of the entryways to the dirt-path Park Way, which still exists, Nancy pointed out the former house of Arthur and Margaret Mayers, parents of Dan Mayers, who at age 22 was a young physicist doing ancillary research for the Manhattan Project. Nancy's parents were left-leaning intellectuals (though her father was a businessman) and she told me the Mayers and her parents were part of a group that called itself (partly in irony) the Brain Trust. The group met at each other's homes to discuss topics of which there now is no record I know of. Among her parents good friends was Carey McWilliams, who lived on Alvarado about 50 yards away from their house.

Nancy’s childhood home – where she was born and lived until she went away to Stanford -- is known to many as the somewhat mysterious large house set at the end of a long driveway at 2091 Cerro Gordo, where the street meets North Alvarado. After walking the stair-street section of Lemoyne Street, we drove to the house on Cerro Gordo, where the present owners, the aforementioned Jack and Ludmilla, were expecting Nancy.

The house was built in the late 1920s by Nancy’s parents – it was designed by the architect Sumner Spaulding, who was one of the designers of City Hall as well as part of LAX and Green Acres, Buster Keaton’s estate. We stayed for about an hour, touring the four-bedroom house and the garden, where Nancy was married almost 50 years ago with Joan Weber as her maid of honor. She pointed out the camellias her mother had planted. She said she had a childhood memory of standing in the yard at night. She could see into the yard of a neighbor to the north. The neighbor was a preacher of the night (my term). Standing alone, he shined a spotlight on himself and preached into a microphone, directing his words toward Silver Lake. This was during World War II.

Three decades later, Ludmilla was a kid. She lived on Lemoyne. She said that she and her friends used to ride their ten-speed bikes around the neighborhood, and she would stop at the gates to Nancy Stone’s house. “I would look up the driveway and wonder what kind of people would live in that house,” which was grand for Elysian Park. “I never saw anyone there,” she said, sitting in the living room of the same home, which she has owned with her husband since 1996. “It was always quiet.”

The rooms are filled with one-of-a-kind vintage objects – a four- or five-foot sculpture of a toy race car sits on top of an upright piano, for example – while the house is being renovated one room at a time.

Ludmilla’s mother and stepfather still live at the address where she was raised. Her stepfather is a former police officer, who, as a child, was an extra in the “Little Rascals,” which was filmed in Echo Park and Silver Lake. (I have visited the still-standing bungalows on Duane Street where the show was filmed.)

Meanwhile, on Red Hill, Rasputin is Ludmilla and Jack’s 120-pound German shepherd, who was rescued as a puppy on a freeway ramp and is now sleek and enormous. The other dog is a golden retriever -- Nicholas. And there used to be Tsaritsa.

According to Nancy’s family lore, she ended up being raised on Red Hill because her uncle Rudolph Stein – who was supposed to be kosher – ate a bad pork sausage in San Francisco. He died of trichonosis, and Nancy’s father, whose name was Stone. was called upon to run Stein’s textile concern in Los Angeles. Which is how he came to build a house on the highest hill in Echo Park.