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15–21 MAY 1932 · THE CITY'S HUNDREDTH YEAR
In the worst year of the Depression, Mishawaka celebrated its hundredth anniversary by turning its downtown into a fairground. Centennial Week ran from Sunday 15 May to Saturday 21 May 1932. The week opened in the sacred register, with an interfaith religious service in Battell Park on Sunday afternoon; then the fair took the street. "During the week, carnival rides and attractions were available on Main Street downtown," the city history records, "and high-dive and high-wire performers amazed spectators" — the classic apparatus of the American street fair, rides and free acts over a closed business street, mounted not by a merchants' association in the boom years but by a whole city in a depression, for its birthday. The week's full program is culture's to tell as the city's great act of self-celebration; what this section owns is its fair anatomy, and the anatomy was complete: a midway on Main Street, aerial performers, contests, a costume ball, a pet parade, ethnic demonstrations, and a closing parade.
The days filled in around the carnival. On Monday evening a thousand people joined the Centennial Costume Ball, at which Mishawaka High School student Virginia Ainlay was named the winner of the Princess Mishawaka contest — the legend operationalized as a fair queen, in the princess's own city. Tuesday belonged to the schools, which all held open houses, with a concert, style show and dramatic performance at the high school. Wednesday brought the all-city junior high track meet and the Pow-wow and Bow-wow Parade, children and their pets. On Thursday a civic luncheon filled the Hotel Mishawaka, a crowd went to Lincoln Park for the dedication of the boulder and bronze plaque at the princess's supposed grave site, and that evening six to ten thousand people watched the centennial historical pageant tell the story of Princess Mishawaka and the first settlement. Friday's program had, in the city history's words, "an ethnic flavor": Belgian and Italian folk dancing and musical groups, with demonstrations of Belgian bowling and archery — the West End's games performed as fair attractions, the one parish-and-enclave festival material this section can document at full size, and carried again at pointer size in the next entry. Saturday closed the week with the massive street parade — eighteen musical groups, over a hundred floats, twenty-five thousand people watching — and a second performance of the pageant in the evening. The Mishawaka Chamber of Commerce estimated that one hundred thousand visitors came to Mishawaka for the centennial, which it called "the outstanding week of Mishawaka's history" — the Chamber's figure and the Chamber's phrase, printed as theirs. The city history's own judgment needs no attribution inflation: Centennial Week "helped local merchants and promoted community pride and spirit during a time of economic distress." For one week, eighty years after the county fair came to town, Mishawaka was again a fair town — on its own street, on its own account.
Principal sources: De Kever, History of Mishawaka, the Centennial Week passage, read first-hand; the week as civic celebration stands whole in this build's culture leg.