DOWN MICHIGAN STREET, just south of the Studebaker factory district, sits the United Auto Workers Local 5 hall, home to what was once America’s largest auto union local. Like many auto workers’ halls, it has a stage for speaking, with an American flag, a portrait of Walter Reuther on the wall, and a big UAW logo painted as a backdrop matching the smaller one affixed to the podium. But unlike any other local union hall I’ve seen, its concrete-block walls on either side are covered with murals depicting the union’s story, including Studebaker’s fall as seen from the perspective of the workers. One section shows workers making an uncertain departure from the factory grounds on the day that their jobs, and thousands of others, came to a sudden end.
Old-timers on the West Side can tell you what it was like on that gray December day in 1963, just weeks after the Kennedy assassination, when news got out that the company was about to shut down. Jack Colwell, who covers me to this day in his South Bend Tribune columns, was the bearer of doom in a story he broke as a cub reporter, under the headline: “AUTO OUTPUT TO END HERE.”
Jack, who also teaches at Notre Dame and writes a weekly column on politics, is gentle and disarming, never breaking his smile as he toggles his gaze, now looking down at his notepad full of orderly script, now back up at you through his glasses as he listens intently. Like Mark Peterson, another experienced local reporter, he has a way of looking at you as if you are about to say something very interesting and important, which of course makes you want to oblige, rather than stick to your talking points.
Maybe that’s how Jack got the scoop, a day before Studebaker planned to make the announcement from a safe remove in New York City. It was probably the biggest local story ever, but South Bend was not ready to hear it. Jack wrote later that some workers “were hostile toward carriers delivering that paper, that news, at shift end to Gate 1 on Sample Street,” with one repeatedly yelling, “It’s not official yet!”
Social science research hadn’t yet confirmed that sudden job loss can be the psychological equivalent of losing a loved one, but everyone must have sensed the depth of harm this news would bring as thousands of jobs were wiped out in a matter of days. Some were defiant about the city’s future, like Paul Gilbert, the clothing store owner, who told a gathering of civic leaders: “This is not Studebaker, Indiana. This is South Bend, Indiana.” But there was no escaping the fact that we had become a company town without its company.
The decline was not instantaneous, but 1963 was like a fulcrum. There was Before, and there was After.
It is difficult for someone born twenty years later to truly picture Before, but you can see it in the bustle of our downtown on the old postcards. You can sense it in the grandeur of the big stone houses—castles, almost—that the local titans of industry built to live in. In old photos, you can sense that the South Bend Tribune was justified in describing the Oliver Hotel as “the best and most magnificent in Indiana” when it opened in 1899, complete with frescoes in the lobby and steam baths downstairs.
Nor were South Bend’s charms just for the wealthy. Bob Urbanski was the son of a butcher in a big Polish family, like so many others on the West Side. He was clearly bright, yet he had been struggling to follow lessons in class, and his seventh-grade teacher realized it had something to do with his eyesight. “He moved me to the front of the class and asked some questions and met my father one day after school and talked to him,” Bob remembered. It turned out Bob needed glasses. So his father took him to the eye doctor downtown, where he was examined and got his first prescription. He remembers emerging and seeing the splendor of the downtown for the first time: “And I walked outside and I looked to the north down Michigan Street and I was just awed. The lights weren’t just a blur. It was like someone took a camera lens and . . . they were crisp, you could see the sign for Osco’s and Spiro’s and Milady Shop and Robertson’s and Wyman’s Department Store, all this stuff that was down there.”
What young Bob saw was a dense cluster of clothing, furniture, and department stores that transacted the arrival of the modern American middle class. The avenue was packed, and on Mondays and Thursdays the shops would stay open into evening. As in the department store scene of A Christmas Story, it was a special occasion for kids to accompany their parents downtown to shop, “typically before Easter, or a new suit for a Communion, that sort of thing.” Then they would return home to a West Side bustling with families moving among neighborhood groceries, churches, and taverns, as the aroma of half a dozen Eastern European countries’ cuisines wafted into the city air.
At Christmas, fish head soup would be served, and, of course, there would be pierogies. Bob’s grandma would make a hundred of them at a time, rolling the dough on a table, putting the cheese on them, folding them by hand. The kids would eat them right out of the boiling pot. “But my grandpa would take it, slit the thing, put butter in each one, then pour cream over it.”
That was reserved for special occasions. But when bread could be truly fresh it could be a treat any day, so much that some days Bob’s father literally couldn’t wait to get the bread home from the Hungarian bakery. He would bring a quarter stick of butter from home with him when he went to pick up the boys from school downtown. If they saw the butter in the front seat, they knew they were going to the bakery, just in time for the hot bread to come out of the oven at three o’clock. “We’d go over there and get a loaf of it, and it wasn’t sliced, we’d get to the car and tear it, and he had his pocketknife and he’d chop up butter and put it on if you wanted it.” The day he died, Bob’s father was making a pot of czernina, a Polish duck blood soup, stirring in the potato dumplings.
Children were raised not just by parents, but by neighborhoods. Gladys Muhammad, about the same age as Bob, remembers the LaSalle Park neighborhood: “You could go anywhere, next door anywhere, and eat, they’d just invite you in and eat, and if you did anything wrong, the neighbors would tell on you. . . . So everybody was real disciplined.” Gladys went to Washington High School, which was racially integrated—but the neighborhoods were not. Red-lining hemmed in African-Americans like her to the LaSalle Park area colloquially known as “the Lake,” after the pond at the bottom of the sledding hill there. Walking to school, Gladys would have to cross the railroad tracks, sometimes clambering through an open boxcar to get there. African-American residents couldn’t live south of the tracks, though they were more than welcome to work, as her father did, alongside the Polish and Hungarian and Irish men on the line at Studebaker.