A look back at our town 60 years ago when new business, chamber of commerce turmoil, a multi-talented grandmother, a flying ace, and the winding down of the Korean War vied with a booming economy for headlines.
How Big Is It: The large sign on the southwest corner Broadway and Olive hinted that the new lessee for the lot was "really big." Dave Cunningham of McMahon's Furniture and Stephen Westover of Lemon Grove Lumber (see photo) speculated that either a department store or supermarket was on the horizon.
Max Goodwin, editor of the Review, wrote, "We know, but cannot tell…yet. But like the sign says, it's really BIG."
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We'll continue to ferret through 1953, dear readers, in hopes of blowing Max's cover. Meantime, that corner sports a used car lot, one of many in our town.
The Godfather: Lemon Grove godfather, Tony Sonka, coiner of its slogan "Best Climate on Earth," backer of its Big Lemon, and scion of Sonka Bros' General Store (today, Grove Pastry Shop), was accused of "railroading" the Cypress Street-Alton Drive improvement project to better serve homes he owned in the area.
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Max Goodwin, president pro tem of the Lemon Grove Chamber of Commerce, argued that the county road commission should "avoid Sonka's plot" and back a direct road connecting Lomita Village in southeast San Diego with Broadway to bolster the business district, then enjoying the booming post war economy.
Max portrayed Sonka as a veritable consigliere with "messenger boys" hand-carrying his letters to the commission. But more than a score of residents protested Max's view--they wanted Cypress widened and the connection to Alton improved. Anyway, after helping hungry families eat in the 1930s and 1940s, and letting them run up credit at his store, Sonka was easily the most popular man in town.
Upshot: Today, Skyline Drive connects Lomita Village to our downtown. Cypress tippy-toes around on both sides of Skyline and there is that odd little dog-leg in the Alton Drive neighborhood, former site of the famously fragrant Miller Dairy. Let the charm continue.
A Great Grandma: None other than her grandson, Robert Turnbull III, hailed Antwonet Treganza's string of firsts. In his column for the Review, the Helix High senior revealed that this wife of "Big Lemon" designer and builder of our first post office, Alberto Treganza, was a whiz in her own right.
Antwonet (ahn-two-nay) Kaufman was born in 1888 at LaCrosse, Wisc. and was the first woman president of the California Democratic Club and Lemon Grove Chamber of Commerce, the first woman postmistress in the Lemon Grove Post Office, a president of the Lemon Grove PTA, officer in the Forward (Women's) Club, and a noted columnist.
She wrote for the Lemon Grove-Encanto-News Beacon, one of the first newspapers in East County; the Lemon Grove Review from 1929-48; and the San Diego Union from 1926-40. In the latter, her "Talks and Walks with Mother Nature" revealed the Treganzas' vast knowledge of American birds. She helped Alberto classify birds for the U.S. Dept. of Interior in Utah. He discovered the Treganza Blue Heron in 1907 at Great Salt Lake.
Fly, She Said: Lemon Grove's First Lady of Flight, Isabelle McCrae, was named a hostess of the Fifth Annual Aviation Ball set for May 11 at the American Legion Hall, 8118 University Avenue.
In 1953, she entered the annual Ninety-Nines transcontinental air race of licensed women pilots set for July 3, with the route from Lawrence, Mass., to Long Beach.
In the 1952 race, McCrae was the first to reach Teterboro Airport, New Jersey from California. That race doubled as a training mission in response to the Korean War when women might again be called up as pilots in the service of their country.
Korean POW Scooped: The Review was the nation's first community newspaper to publish a photo of the first returned Korean POW from East County. Airman Second Class Robert Weinbrandt, 20, El Cajon, was seen in bed in a San Francisco military hospital prior to moving to the San Diego Naval Hospital.
Weinbrandt's horror story is this: On the night of Jan. 28, 1953 he was a tail gunner on a B-29 on a bombing run to Pyongyang. After the bomb drop, the plane was intercepted by an enemy MiG and caught fire as Weinbrandt tried to shoot it down in the dark. The commander ordered a bail-out--three men got out, with Weinbrandt last after crawling from the tail to the escape hatch.
Weinbrandt limped and crawled for hours with shrapnel wounds to both feet before being captured. For 18 days he was interrogated under torture with his wounds untreated. Finally he was taken to an enemy POW hospital and his feet amputated by Chinese doctors.
On Apr. 24 he became the first U.S. airman POW to be exchanged by the Communists in "Operation Big Switch." He was handed over and flown to the Tokyo Army Hospital, where one leg was amputated below the knee. He died in 1985, age 52.
You remember the 1970 hit movie, M.A.S.H (Mobile Army Surgical Unit) set in the Korean War. Black humor, boys-will-be-boys, big stars, lots of awards. None of it quite added up to what happened to Robert Weinbrandt in a war, which, like Vietnam, is still a back burner deal in the hearts and minds of most Americans.
Wa-di-ta-ka: This means "brave" and surely applied to the customers of the Lemon Grove Waditaka Camp Fire girls, who sold 1,886 cans of peanuts in a digestion-busting burst of fundraising zeal.
Let the Trumpets Sound: In a field of 94 statewide competitors in the May Time Band Review at National City, the Lemon Grove Junior High Marching Band placed third, continuing a winning streak going back to 1947. The plucky players in their vivid gold and green uniforms (first paid for by godfather Tony Sonka--see above) tooted and drummed their way to glory for decades.
And so it went in early May, 1953 in our town when we didn't always know what songs were sung in the hearts of our next-door neighbors.
About this column: Compiled by Helen Ofield, president of the Lemon Grove Historical Society, from newspapers archived at the H. Lee House Cultural Center. Each week, we take a peek at the past with some news and advertising highlights from a randomly chosen edition of the Lemon Grove Review. In 2012 Ofield was awarded second place in non-daily reporting and writing from the Society of Professional Journalists for the column.
