By Thomas Larson – SanDiegoReader.com – Photo: Matthew Suárez.
Photo: Five-panel, half-block-long, sun-splashed mural of Lemon Grove on the side of the Lemon Grove Baking Company, once the Sonka Brothers General Store.
During the 1920s, in the robust selling of Southern California life, Lemon Grove flaunted its superiority. It had an “excellent women’s club,” the best golf courses, good churches, paved roads, “a live-wire chamber of commerce,” “well-equipped schools,” and a thriving citrus industry. Its “better class of people” featured “professional[s] and businessmen” whose putative exceptionalism meant new arrivals would not “find a better class of people anyplace.”
