Peter J. De Kever — the historian-laureate, whole

BOOKS 2003–2024 · HISTORIAN LAUREATE OF MISHAWAKA SINCE 2019

The tie. Peter J. De Kever's tie is the fullest this section can print: a lifelong Mishawaka resident, a proud graduate of Mishawaka High School's class of 1986, formed by the city's own schools and by Indiana University (Bloomington, class of 1990; IU South Bend, 1997). His day's work has been teaching — English at Penn High School, in the township east of the city, since 1990, where his Spell Bowl and Academic Super Bowl social-studies teams won a combined twenty-eight state championships. For more than twenty-five years, on his museum's biography, he has researched and written the history of the city he has never left. Mayor David Wood appointed him Historian Laureate of the City of Mishawaka in 2019; he serves as president and curator of the Mishawaka Historical Museum; and in January 2020 the mayor named him a Drum Major for community service at the Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast, in the citation's words for a man who "assists the city with history projects" and credits his parents "for his love for Mishawaka and its rich history." His person stands at pointer size in People; his books are this section's center, because this entire record is built on them.

The essay volumes. The shelf opens with two books of essays. With Our Past: Essays on the History of Mishawaka (2003) gathered essays written mainly in the mid- to late 1990s — on the city's founder, on a prominent Black family, on the city's sports past — and its author has printed his own audit of it: Fitzsimmons is nowhere in it, and the confession stands in his next book's introduction ("I, too, share in local historians' culpability for past neglect of Fitzsimmons. I was not ready yet."). Past to Present: More Essays on the History of Mishawaka, the second volume — the Fechner essay of 2004–05, on a Mishawaka soldier who died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in 1942, belongs to its making — was in print by 2013, when his publisher's biography for the Fitzsimmons book already names both volumes as his.

The baseball life. Freddie Fitzsimmons: A Baseball Life (AuthorHouse, 24 September 2013) is the shelf's detour and its proof of method. Fitzsimmons, the knuckleballer who pitched nineteen seasons for the Giants and Dodgers, was Mishawaka's own by upbringing, and no biography of him existed; De Kever spent seven years making the first one, beginning on an August morning in 2006 at the Victoria Street home of the pitcher's brother Dick, who "with great loyalty... kept alive his brother Fred's memory," and running, in his own summary, "from his birthplace in Tipton County, Indiana, to the sites of each of the major league ballparks he played in." The book's introduction is this record's best evidence of the historian's method: exhaustive, self-correcting in public, and built from interviews, library photocopies and the family's keeping — "part of this masonry of memory, an ongoing work to which each reader lends a welcome hand."

The walking book and the trade shelf. Walking Mishawaka: Self-Guided Tours of Historic Sites in the Princess City (2016), his fourth book, turned the essays into ground: seven walking tours weaving historical portraits into present-day walks, seventy-two significant locations and thirty-two graves in the historic cemeteries, sold for twenty dollars at the Hannah Lindahl Children's Museum, a camera store, a jeweler's and a frame shop — the local shelf in the plainest sense, a book bought where the walks begin. The trade publishers followed: Hidden History of Mishawaka (The History Press, 2021) gathered the forgotten stories — the Hotel Mishawaka dedication day of 5 July 1909, the volunteers' photograph of 10 May 1917, the 1926–27 basketball team's run — and Lost Mishawaka (Arcadia Publishing, 2024) walked the vanished city: the Great Fire of 1872, the street carnival of August 1901, the Twin Branch power plant of which "hardly a trace remains today." Between them stands his recovery of the city's poet: Rose Hartwick Thorpe and 150 Years of "Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight", the book-length return of Mishawaka's most famous literary daughter to the city that had forgotten her, carried in the museum's own list of his works.

The method, in his words. The through-line of the shelf is recovery against forgetting, and he has stated it in one sentence, to the diocesan newspaper, standing among the graves of St. Joseph, Fairview and Mishawaka City cemeteries, whose dead his tours teach: "If these people are forgotten, it's like they died twice." The cemetery tours began about 2017 and run still; the museum board, the children's museum board, the time-capsule display for the city, the commissioned history the city gives away — the books stand inside a practice of public memory of which they are the printed part. The city keeps honoring the practice: in the fall of 2024 the School City of Mishawaka Education Foundation's program for the high school's centennial honored him by name — "a lifelong Mishawaka resident and proud MHS graduate from the class of 1986," who "for the past 25 years... has been passionately researching and writing about Mishawaka's history" — as the school's own historian. His standing in this record needs no adjective: the Story of Mishawaka section of the Mishawaka build is his commissioned history, its sources lean on his essays, and Culture carries him as the city's memory-keeper. This section adds only the bibliography, whole: two essay volumes, a baseball biography, a walking book, a hidden history, a lost city, a poet's recovery, and a commissioned history — eight books, all of them about one small city, by the man the city named its laureate.

Sources:

1. Mishawaka Historical Museum, "About the Museum" (board biography), read November 2026 — the lifelong residence, the class of 1986, Penn High School teaching since 1990, the twenty-eight state championships, the twenty-five years of research, the book list through the Thorpe volume, the Historian Laureate title.
2. Indiana University South Bend, IU News (31 January 2020) — the Drum Major naming, the degrees (IU Bloomington '90, IU South Bend '97), the laureate appointment and its duties, the boards.
3. Today's Catholic (Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend), 13 August 2020 — the appointment by Mayor David Wood in 2019, the cemetery tours, the "died twice" sentence, and the three cemeteries' ground.
4. AuthorHouse, book record for Freddie Fitzsimmons: A Baseball Life — publication 24 September 2013, ISBNs, and the author biography naming With Our Past and Past to Present as already his.
5. Peter J. De Kever, introduction to Freddie Fitzsimmons, read first-hand (Everand) — the 2003 book's essay dates and contents, the Dick FitzSimmons interview of August 2006, the seven years, the "masonry of memory."
6. Penn-Harris-Madison School Corporation (27 May 2016) — Walking Mishawaka as his fourth book: seven tours, seventy-two locations, thirty-two graves, the twenty-dollar local sale.
7. The History Press, via the booksellers' record — Hidden History of Mishawaka (2021), ISBN 9781540250285; Arcadia Publishing, via Barnes & Noble — Lost Mishawaka (2024), ISBN 9781467157919, and its contents in summary.
8. School City of Mishawaka Education Foundation, centennial program (fall 2024) — the honor by name, the twenty-five years, the book list as the schools print it, the Historian Laureate line.