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Community Corner

1950: Welcome Our Wanderers Home

The Big Lemon was just five years from the close of WWII and the town was growing with refugees.

News from the Aug. 10, 1950 edition of the Lemon Grove Review when farm and ranch news was laced with a few momentous events in a newspaper that rarely carried photographs —save one of regal pedigree.

Progeny of Polish Princess Fêted:  The story of Princess Filomena Wojciechowski of the Polish House of Sledzinski captured (and continues to caputure) the imagination of Grovians shortly after her arrival in town as a refugee from the Soviet gulag.

The princess and her husband, John Sledzinski, purchased a home on six acres, which they dubbed Polonia Acres, at Radio Road and Federal Boulevard.  The actual address was 6810 Broadway and included a legal burial plot for the Sledzinskis.  

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But the princess, weakened by Soviet hard labor in the mines of the Ural Mountains, lingered only briefly in the best climate on earth, dying in 1941.  Later, when "Little Polonia" became the on-ramp to new Route 94, the princess was exhumed and taken to Greenwood Memorial Park for re-burial.

The couple had a son, Thaddeus Stephan, who married and produced two children, Filomena Elizabeth and Francis Joseph II. That August, Filomena, 2, and Francis, 6 months, were christened at the U.S. Naval Hospital Chapel, San Diego.  The party of 53 guests then repaired to Polonia Acres for a garden party at which the babes displayed their finery—Polish Krakowska ensembles handmade by their mother—and the Polish national anthem, Mazurek Dabrowskiego, was sung.

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The fact that the babies' photo was the only one in three August editions of the Review indicates the regard Grovians had for their refugee royalty—though this wasn't the first time the town had enfolded European wanderers to its bosom.

The Cobbler's Journey:  Rella's Shoe Store, 7850 Broadway (today, Lemon Grove Optometry), held its second birthday party. Raul Rella apprenticed as a calzolaio—a cobbler or shoemaker—at age nine in Naples and by 15 owned his own shop. At 18, hearing that America was a sweet land of opportunity, he emigrated to New York City, where he met beauteous Anna Belluscio.

They married and struggled while Raul attended night school and they studied to become naturalized (1928) when Raul became "Ralph" and Anna became "Anne." In 1946 they moved to San Diego and opened a shoe repair shop on Fifth Avenue.

Hearing of opportunities in the growing town of Lemon Grove, they built a double building on Broadway, stocked one with shoes and rented the other. In August, 1950, they still lived with their three children in San Diego, but were searching for a home in The Big Lemon to be nearer to work and their church, St. John of the Cross.  

Darling Doings: First Congregational Church held its summer Ice Cream Social in Friendship Hall (today Civic Center Park) in support of the organ fund. The Myra Sonka Dancers performed, along with the Kitchen Band (local "musical mamas") and some "surprise numbers." 

Mr. and Mrs. DeWitt Mytinger gave a fencing demonstration. No, not the picket variety, but the one with masks, padded vests and slender rapiers. Like Myra Sonka, they were descended from mitteleuropa families.

Mrs. Ruth Kerfoot, Alton Drive, was a major button collector and driving force in the San Diego Button Club, whose annual display in the California State Button Show at the U.S. Grant Hotel, won plaudits.  She spoke on the "Button Personalities" forum and showed antique buttons that had arrived on the clothing of European immigrants.

The Petite Shop, 7810 Broadway, displayed the National Doll Club exhibition of antique dollies and wardrobes, especially those brought from other lands.

Creature Comforts: The town was full of businesses related to ranching and farming. Lemon Grove Pet Shop, 8303 Imperial, offered singing green parakeets ("can be trained to talk") at $1.25 a piece, collie shepherd pups for $2.50 and baby hamsters for 75 cents.

Bill's Feed Store offered baby chicks for immediate, free delivery, along with the patented Feed-O-Crate, poultry supplies, hay and grain.

Mason Feed & Supply, 8280 Imperial, had fresh horse meat for 19 cents a pound and all sizes of chicken and rabbit crocks. These weren't crock pots, but stoneware feeders. Lemon Grovians still raised an abundance of chickens and rabbits in the backyard and benefited from the Old World lore of post WWII migrants.

Pests Bedevil Crops: The County Agricultural Extension had a half-page section in the Review from 1948 into the 1960s. That August, screw worms attacked livestock, six-spotted mites attacked avocados, Peruvian leafhoppers attacked vegetables, and cows suffered from mastitis.

Interestingly, the county warned against using DDT, the spray that killed everything in its path and led to human deformities in utero. True, during WWII, DDT controlled malaria and typhus among civilians and troops, and Swiss chemist Paul Müller received the 1948 Nobel Prize for discovering that DDT was an efficient agricultural insecticide.

But in 1950 with the polio scare in full swing and the nagging feeling that DDT, a colorless, odorless product, might be less than benign, caution was in order. The county recommended two to four pounds of wettable sulphur to 100 gallons of water for controlling pests.

Not until publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, and the launch of the environmental movement, would DDT bite the dust and the song of the robin and the thrush return once more to America's landscapes.

On the Horizon: Helix High School wasn't yet built and Lewis Smith, Superintendent of the Grossmont Union High School District, was asking for help. Though the State bond of $250 million had passed in November, 1949, not a pfennig had been allocated for the promised new schools. 

Smith asked the Lemon Grove Chamber of Commerce to protest to Governor Warren, the Dept. of Finance and the State Allocation Board.  Smith also asked for names for our new high school. The Chamber approved "Mt. Helix High School," a moniker that won favor districtwide.

Powwow Program Planned: Powwow Days, the ancestor of Old Time Days, was held in mid-August replete with a "grand parade, novelty dances, wheelchair square dance, rope act, Marine Band and a stage contest." The latter featured a talent show of local singers vying for Best Western Warbler and a demonstration of native dishes from the town's immigrants. More about the spectacular Powwow in our next column.

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.  Ofield was awarded first place in 2013 and second place in 2012 in non-daily column writing from the Society of Professional Journalists.

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