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1942 — 1945 · the production stoppage and the Mishawaka record
The national frame: In February 1942 the American automobile industry stopped building civilian cars altogether, by federal order, and did not resume until the autumn of 1945; the factories that had supplied Mishawaka's showrooms — Studebaker across the river among them — built war material instead. For a dealer, the stoppage meant four model years with no new cars to sell: the franchised stores of the country survived on the two lines of business that remained, used cars and service, keeping a rationed and aging national fleet running on scarce parts and tires. That is the documented frame of the trade's war, in the trade press and the industry's standard histories.
The Mishawaka size of it — and the gap:The war-years census of Mishawaka's stores — which of the pre-war names kept their service doors open through 1942–45 — is therefore a named gap, with the 1942 through 1945–46 Mishawaka Polk volumes as its settling source. What the brackets do show is the shape of the survival: the Ford point that stood in the city in 1921 stands in it still, under new names, in 1949; and the 1949 field, in the entry below, is a field rebuilt — half its houses postwar in their documented form, one of them selling a make, Kaiser-Frazer, that was itself a creature of the war's end, organized in 1945 and in Mishawaka showrooms within four years.
Sources:
- The industry's standard record of the 1942–45 civilian production stoppage (federal production orders of February 1942; resumption in the autumn of 1945), as carried in the trade press and marque histories read.
- Indiana State Library, the Indiana city-directories list for Mishawaka — the wartime Polk volumes (1942, 1944, 1945–46 and their companions) surviving on microfilm and in subscription databases; named here as the settling source for the war-years census this history could not read first-hand.
- Polk's South Bend city directories, 1921 and 1949 (read first-hand) — the bracketing canvasses from which the survival shape above is drawn.