The Grounds of the Visits — a vice president's evening, 1908; a president at Bethel, 2006

1908 · 2006 · THE NATIONAL STAGE, AT THE SIZE IT CAME

1908: On 28 October 1908, a week before the general election, Charles W. Fairbanks, the sitting Vice President of the United States and Indiana's own, came to Mishawaka, and the city turned out for him twice in one evening. The events record of this history owns the visit whole; this chapter owns its grounds, which are three. He supped at St. Paul's Episcopal Church as the Bishop Knickerbacker Guild's honored guest, speaking to the three hundred people crammed into the undercroft and shaking hands in the rectory. He rode to Mayor Charles Frank's residence at 813 West Second Street and addressed more than a thousand gathered outside it. And outside the Century Theater he spoke again, after a parade of touring cars carried the party through the downtown. A vice president's Mishawaka survives as a church basement, a mayor's front yard and a theater's marquee — none of the three a famous building, all three made briefly national by the man standing in them.

2006: Ninety-eight years later the national stage returned at its modern size. On 23 February 2006, President George W. Bush spoke at Bethel College's Wiekamp Center in Mishawaka — the first visit of a sitting President of the United States to the city — at a fundraiser for Representative Chris Chocola, with more than five hundred contributors in the room and more than a thousand students watching on a live feed in the Everest-Rohrer Chapel/Fine Arts Center. The Wiekamp Center is a working college arena, famous for one evening only, and this chapter prints it at that size. The events record closes the file with its search shown: between Fairbanks and Bush and after, no other president's or vice president's stop in Mishawaka stands in the press record reached — the presidential traffic of the valley, President Johnson's damage survey of 1965 among it, arrived through South Bend and is boundary-printed as South Bend's. Mishawaka's file of national visitation is two evenings, ninety-eight years apart, and it is complete.

Sources:

1. The events record of this history — the Fairbanks visit of 28 October 1908 whole (St. Paul's Church, 813 West Second Street, the Century Theater), the Bush visit of 23 February 2006 at the Wiekamp Center, and the file of visits with its search shown.
2. The culture record of this history — the pair of visits as the city's ritual record prints them.