The defense decades: missiles, foam, and fuel cells

1950s – 1990s

The missile work: From 1959, in the marker's account, the plant made missile components — case insulation and filament-wound motor cases for the Minuteman intercontinental missile and the Navy's Polaris submarine missile — with over six million dollars of tooling in continuous use on all three shifts, the work ending as the missiles passed wholly to silo and submarine service. The plant's own film unit documented the work while it ran: the IU South Bend Archives' film collection holds the plant's Polaris films of 1963 and 1965, a 1965 film of concrete-containment work in Vietnam, a 1969 sled-test film, and a 1970 film of portable rubber containers — the works filming its defense decades as it had filmed its foremen's picnics, and the films survive where the buildings do not.

The other lines: The same decades ran on civilian and military rubber in parallel, in the marker's itemization: Ensolite, made from the 1950s, went into Korean War military boots, jackets, and pants; heavy rubber extrusions and industrial adhesives were added from 1958, the adhesives reaching more than eight hundred gallons a day by the 1960s, with roofing adhesives a significant later line; and research and development on the Royalite thermoplastic sheet began in 1962. The city's counsel, in the law firm's published account of the site's redevelopment, describes the plant's later product mix as the footwear of the middle decades — Ball-Band sport shoes and boots, Keds, and military jungle boots — together with the other rubber products; its dating of United States Rubber footwear manufacture at the plant "beginning in 1914" stands against the 1898 record carried above and is noted here as that account's own discrepancy, not followed.

The last fuel cells: The fuel-cell craft that began with Doolittle's tanks ran the full length of the plant's life: the marker records fuel cells for the F/A-18 Hornet and the B-52 in the plant's later years, and Tomahawk cruise-missile fuel containers in production into the 1990s — the last documented defense line of a works that had entered war production in 1941. When the plant closed in 1997, the line that closed with it was fifty-six years old and had armed four wars' aircraft.

Sources:

1. Ball-Band Factory marker — missile components from 1959 (Minuteman and Polaris insulation and filament-wound motor cases, over $6 million of tooling on three shifts), Ensolite in Korean War boots, jackets, and pants, extrusions and adhesives from 1958 at 800-plus gallons daily by the 1960s, Royalite research from 1962, and fuel cells for the F/A-18, the B-52, and Tomahawk containers into the 1990s.
2. IU South Bend Archives, Mishawaka Woolen and Rubber Company Film Collection — the Polaris films of 1963 and 1965, the 1965 Vietnam containment film, the 1969 sled test, and the 1970 portable-container film.
3. Plews Shadley Racher & Braun LLP, published account of the city's site acquisition — the later product mix as the firm's account gives it, with its 1914 footwear dating noted against the 1898 record.