The partnerships that finished it

The story people tell here is that early on, one man bought half the place. It was not one man, and it was not half.

The company that built this place ends with a builder that did not stay long enough to finish the job. Two general partnerships finished it, eleven months apart, and they are the parties that signed the restated CC&Rs in your closing packet.

The two deeds out

McKeon Construction left Jamacha Greens in two bulk transactions, eleven months apart.

Recorded	Buyer	Units	What financed it
December 24, 1975	M L M Investors, a general partnership	93	A purchase money note of $1,632,700.00 payable back to McKeon
November 30, 1976	Jamacha Associates, a general partnership	64	$271,500.00 from La Jolla Federal Savings and Loan

157 units of 192. The other 35 were already in other hands by the time each deed was recorded; who held them is not something either instrument says.

The Christmas Eve deed is the one with a price attached. Its documentary transfer tax is $1,834.80, and San Diego County charged $0.55 per $500 of taxable value — 3,336 increments exactly, with no remainder, so $1,668,000. The purchase money note recorded the same afternoon is $1,632,700.00, which leaves $35,300 paid outside the note.

That note is an all-inclusive one, wrapped over a senior note of $4,530,000.00 in favor of The Chase Manhattan Bank, dated July 30, 1974. McKeon sold on seller financing and stayed in the deal: the buyers’ payments ran through the builder’s own construction loan.

The 1976 deed does not yield a price. Its transfer tax reads $398.20, and only that figure divides evenly at $0.55 per $500. What cannot be read is which basis it was charged on — the recorder’s stamp has bled across both checkboxes on the form, and full value and full value less the liens remaining mean very different things. The $271,500 from La Jolla Federal is what the partnership borrowed, which is not what it paid.

Why the place was for sale

McKeon Construction’s trouble was national, and it is in the company’s own numbers.

At George McKeon’s death in November 1976 the Associated Press reported the company had lost $12.3 million in its last fiscal year and $5.6 million the year before, with the stock down from a high of $40 a share to $2. He died on November 13, 1976, seventeen days before the second deed was recorded; the partnership that bought under it had been formed on or about March 31 of that year.

The company’s recorded deeds in San Diego County — every McKeon project, not this one — run 245 in 1972, then 164, then 69 in 1974. From 245 to 69 is a fall of 71.8% in two years. They recover to 210 in 1977 and 221 in 1978, the two best years since the peak.

A deed of trust recorded in August 1974 puts a number on what was left here. It pledges seven counties of McKeon property in one instrument, and the page covering this development lists the units the company still held on July 30, 1974: six in Lot 1, fifteen in Lot 3, thirty-four in Lot 4, thirty-nine in Lot 5. That is 94 units, and the same page conveys an undivided 94/192nds of the common area to match.

Two schedules are attached to it, and they are the same financing seen from two directions. One gives the company’s projected sales price for each of eight active projects, and the line for Jamacha Greens reads $23,000 — the highest of any California condominium on the list. The other allocates release prices against that $4,530,000 Chase note, and $1,469,100 of it is this place — 32.3% of the whole schedule, and nearly double the next largest project on it. The seven projects sum to $4,545,080 against a note of $4,530,000, a difference of $15,080 that nothing we hold explains.

So in the summer of 1974 the builder had 94 unsold units here, a projected sales price of $23,000 still on its schedule, and roughly a third of a New York bank’s collateral standing on Amistad Place.

M L M

The first of the two partnerships had a third partner.

The Statement of Partnership recorded alongside the Christmas Eve deed names all three. Two are John N. Mortenson and Christopher J. Mortenson, father and son, of El Cajon. The third is Gene Littler.

M L M reads as the three surnames in the order the instrument lists and signs them — a reading of a name, not something any document states.

He was a professional golfer. A certified California death certificate, recorded here in 2019 with an affidavit of his widow, gives his usual occupation as PROFESSIONAL GOLFER and his industry as SPORTS: Gene Alec Littler, born in California on July 21, 1930, died February 15, 2019. The affidavit swears that the man on the certificate “is the same person as Gene A. Littler,” which is the name on our partnership instrument.

Two obituaries fill in what the certificate only names. He took the U.S. Amateur in 1953 and the U.S. Open in 1961, one of eleven players ever to win both, and twenty-nine tournaments on the regular tour — a total the Union-Tribune ties for seventeenth all time with Lee Trevino and Harry Cooper, and the USGA gives identically. They called him the Machine, for a swing a man who caddied for him remembered as “metronome-like.”

Then in 1972 a melanoma was cut out from under his left arm. The surgeons took “most of the large golf muscles on his left side” with it and he was told he might never play again; he was forty-two. He came back the following year, to a comeback award from the golf writers and a twenty-fifth tour win he said in his own book meant more to him than the U.S. Open had. Of the four wins he had left after that, three came in 1975, the year this partnership was formed. Two years after it he was in a playoff for the PGA Championship at Pebble Beach, at forty-seven.

So the man who put the L in M L M signed it in the middle of a working career, not in retirement from one. What he was doing in a San Diego real estate partnership is still not in any document we hold, and neither obituary knows this development exists. The Recorder’s index for his name between 1970 and 2019 carries a subdivision map, amended restrictions, notices of completion, rights of way granted to the gas company and deeds of trust to four banks. Those are index rows, not readings of any instrument; what they establish is that the name recurs in property dealings across those years, which is as far as an index can take anyone.

Before they got here

The Mortensons were not new to any of this, and one document settles how not-new.

Eighteen months before the Christmas Eve deed, on June 27, 1974, John N. Mortenson, Inc. recorded a Declaration of Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions over a parcel on Block 24 of El Cajon Heights, alongside the old San Diego and Arizona Eastern right of way. It creates a condominium project of nine units — industrial units, each owner holding “a separate interest in the space and in the roof of an industrial building” — and it creates a nonprofit corporation to run them, named the Mortenson Industrial Park Association.

Class A and Class B membership. A three-to-one Class B vote that converts on a trigger. Assessments, assessment liens, an attorney’s fees clause. It is the same machinery as the document that governs this place, drafted for nine industrial condominiums by people who would shortly own a third of a residential one. They arrived here already running an association of their own, and they had written its rules.

The record holds one other instrument naming that company in this period. On June 24, 1975 a Notice of Default and Election to Sell was recorded against John N. Mortenson, Inc. on a 1972 deed of trust in favor of Landvest, Inc.; the typed figure of $15,650.00 is struck through and rewritten in hand as $26,948.46, initialed twice. Neither partnership that bought here is a party to it. The one-page copy we hold does not say what land was charged, and nothing we hold says how it ended.

The 1977 signatures

In December 1977 the Declaration was restated, and the consent pages of your CC&Rs are the part of that document worth reading closely.

M L M Investors signed for 93 units. Its block is headed UNITS: TOTAL 93 and lists every one of them by address. Jamacha Associates signed for 64, named on page 29 as unit numbers in Lots 1, 5 and 6; Christopher J. Mortenson signed that one personally, as president and treasurer of Lincoln Investment Corporation. Thirteen individual owners signed across the two consent pages.

157 of 192 units is 81.77% of this place, held by two partnerships run by one family and consenting to the document you are bound by.

Whether that was enough on its own to amend it is a question the document does not settle. Declaration X reads:

The original Declaration and this restatement may be amended only by an instrument signed by not less than seventy-five percent (75%) of the owners of condominium units.

Seventy-five percent of 192 is 144, and 157 clears it — if the threshold counts units. Definition H defines “Owner” as the owner of record of fee simple title to any Living Unit; Declaration X is lowercase and says condominium units, a term the document never defines. Under the other reading, two entities are two signatures however much property they hold, and the thirteen individual signatures are what would matter. The document is ambiguous, and settling it is a court’s job, not ours.

They finished the buildings

The partnerships did not only hold what they bought. The permits we hold show them building.

City of El Cajon permits for 954 Amistad Place, Building 2, run through the back half of 1977 in the names of Jamacha Associates and Lincoln Investments Corp. — a construction license tax receipt in August, plumbing and gas at the end of that month, electrical in November, heating and air conditioning the day after that, and a preliminary final in May 1978.

So the last slabs we can document here were poured by a partnership that had already signed the restated CC&Rs, in a corner of the place the builder never finished. And then they sold: 62 deeds out of Jamacha Associates in 1978, with 89 more from Greenfield Investment Corporation in the same twelve months.

What became of them

Christopher J. Mortenson died at 47, after a four-year illness; private memorial services were held on April 25, 1995. The obituary does not give the date of death, and neither does anything else we hold. It describes an architect and developer known in San Diego as a philanthropist — Gaslamp District restoration work, and an 1888 Queen Anne mansion moved from Sherman Heights to Coronado by barge in 1983. He served on the Mayor’s Committee on the Homeless, and the paper records a “long interest in providing innovative low-income housing.”

Lincoln Investment Corporation outlived him. Its 2013 Statement of Information lists three officers: his widow and his two daughters.

The association his family created on Block 24 in 1974 is still registered, and was still litigating over real property as recently as 2023. Nothing in that case touches this development.

What the story gets wrong

Set the record beside it.

It was not one man. It was two partnerships and, in the first, three partners — a father, a son and a golfer — with two family corporations behind the second.

It was not half. It was more. 157 of 192 is 81.77%, and that is a different fact from “half”: it is the fact that made the 1977 signatures matter.

The version people tell kept the event and lost everyone in it. The corrected one is better than the rumor, and not because it is kinder — it is better because every piece of it is a document number somebody can go and order. The ninety-three addresses on page 27 are street numbers on Amistad Place and Amistad Court and Gustavo Street, written out by hand in 1977 by somebody who owned them all. You can read them against your own.