On March 24, 1950, thirty thousand people lined up to check out the inventory at Lakewood’s grand opening. In July, the first resident—a Navy veteran named Jim Huffman—moved in with his family.37 Through the end of the year, twenty more families bought a Lakewood home, on average, every day. By the spring of 1954, a sparse farmland for sugar beets and lima beans had been transformed into one of California’s twenty largest cities.
