60 Years Later: South Bend moves forward after Studebaker’s departure

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (WNDU) - The abrupt end of Studebaker automobile production in South Bend is something the community has now had 60 years to cope with.

The South Bend Tribune broke the story of the planned plant closings on Dec. 9, 1963 — 60 years ago this coming Saturday.

“I wrote the story that broke the news, the bad news of course, that Studebaker was closing,” said Tribune reporter Jack Colwell. “No more auto output.”

The last car rolled off the assembly line on Dec. 20 of that year.

Back in those days, bad news did not travel fast. Newspaper carriers took it to gate one at the Studebaker plant, where shocked workers didn’t take it well.

“A lot of the workers were in disbelief. Well, they didn’t want to believe that their jobs were ending of course, and some were actually kind of hostile,” Colwell explained. “One worker kept hollering, ‘it’s not official yet!’”

At its peak, Studebaker employed as many as 24,000, although 7,000 were on the payroll at closing time.

READ MORE: 60 Years Later: A look back at Studebaker leaving South Bend

Studebaker had been doing business in South Bend since the horse and buggy days, long enough to make its presence profoundly felt and its absence unbearable.

“There was just a ‘can’t do’ attitude where a lot of people in the community thought ‘oh, we can’t afford to do this,’ or ‘if we do it, it’ll fail,’” Colwell said. “They just had a pessimistic attitude, and it took a long time to overcome that.”

Perhaps the owner of Gilbert’s clothing store summed it up best when he proclaimed that this is not Studebaker, Indiana, this is South Bend, Indiana.

A former Studebaker plant was the backdrop in April of 2019, as Pete Buttigieg announced his Presidential campaign.

“And now I can confidently say South Bend is back,” Buttigieg told a capacity crowd. “I ran for mayor in 2011 knowing that nothing like Studebaker would ever come back. But believing that we would, our city would, if we had the courage to reimagine our future.”

In the old Studebaker Building 84, there are places where the present still looks a lot like the past. Entire floors that look frozen in time — like Studebaker left them 60 years ago.

But there are also areas where you can see time marching on — where you can see some of the void Studebaker left behind is being filled.

“We’re right now at about 50%, maybe not the highest and best use, but it pays the bills” said building owner Kevin Smith. “There’re core assets that have been granted to us, and a lot of history that’s been granted us, now I think we’re embracing it and I think we can redefine it. It can be a heritage that we can be proud of and build on top of.”

Smith says the building now houses Purdue Polytechnic University, Purdue Polytechnic High School, and there’s talk of the South Bend Community School Corporation bringing a high school career center there.

The South Bend-Elkhart Regional Partnership also keeps offices there, as does the South Bend Tribune. Some of the building is being used as warehouse space.

While it would be impossible to remove all traces of Studebaker’s existence with so many cars still out on the roads, the old Studebaker buildings on the company’s sprawling 82-acre main campus have now been demolished. The process took some 20 years.

“So, you can’t look at their past failures and get stuck, we have for decades,” Smith said. “You have to say what did the past failures teach us? What did we learn? How do you move forward, pick yourself up?”

As for the impact on workers, 7,000 were on the payroll when operations shut down in South Bend. Thousands more were laid-off and hoping to get called back to work. Thousands more lost their pensions or saw pension benefits cut due to underfunding.

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