The sesquicentennial, 1983: the ritual, fifty years on

THE 150TH BIRTHDAY · A YEARLONG PRODUCTION

Fifty years after the centennial, the city ran the same play with new machinery. A fifteen-member Sesquicentennial Commission planned a yearlong celebration for the 150th birthday in 1983: a costume ball in University Park Mall attended by 1,700 people — the mall, opened four years earlier and already the region's commercial center, standing in for the Hotel Mishawaka of 1909 as the city's grand room — a Princess Mishawaka contest, commemorative plates, spoons and glasses, a history book titled A Mishawaka Mosaic, and a live shot on Good Morning America announcing the birthday to a national audience. Founder's Day, on July 16 in Merrifield Park, reenacted the 1932 centennial pageant — the sesquicentennial's centerpiece was a performance of the centennial — alongside musical performances, a softball game between Republicans and Democrats, a beard-growing contest, organized games, and an arts and crafts show; the local genealogical society presented pioneer certificates to eighty Mishawakans descended from settlers present before 1883. The celebration carried its own logo and its own slogan: "Tomorrow Lives in the Light of Our Past."

The comparison across fifty years is the entry's point, and every term of it is in the record. The ritual's elements held almost exactly: the princess, the pageant, the costume ball, the certificates of descent. What changed was the stage and the audience — a shopping mall for a hotel, a national morning-television audience for a regional crowd, and a slogan that stated outright what the 1932 week had only enacted: that the past was being produced, deliberately, as the city's instrument for facing forward. The culture this section records is not a survival. It is a practice, renewed on schedule, by commission.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the Sesquicentennial Commission, the mall costume ball, the Good Morning America shot, A Mishawaka Mosaic, the Founder's Day program and pioneer certificates, and the slogan, quoted.
2. The malls record of this history — University Park Mall's 1979 opening and regional standing, carried whole there.