Notable People of Mishawaka: The Human Record of the Princess City

People · The Human Record of the Princess City

Mishawaka's people begin, for this record, with the man the whole country knows and the city raised: Adam Driver, who came to Mishawaka at seven, acted on the Mishawaka High School stage, went from its classrooms to a Marine mortar platoon, to Juilliard, and to the center of American film — and who still comes home on the record. Around him this section holds the city's public servants at full size: the Greek immigrant's son born here who sat eleven terms in Congress and ended as president of New York University, the Mishawaka High School graduate who became the first woman on Indiana's federal bench, and the physician who practiced on these streets twelve years before he became the town's first resident to hold national office. It holds the born-here whose fame happened somewhere else, each printed at the tie's true strength — the Knoxville contractor who was low bidder on the Panama Canal, the Memphis mayor, the Muscle Shoals drummer, the MGMT founder. It holds the musicians as persons: two trumpet-playing brothers from an Italian club band's house, the two greatest steel guitarists of their century, both from this one small city, the singing daughter of a gospel family, the violinist who walked into John Mellencamp's band and out the other side into a solo career of rare standing. It holds the quiet recoveries the compilations miss: the man who put the synthetic drumhead under nearly every drummer alive, the engineer the world's electromagnetic-compatibility field called Mr. EMC Standards, the Red Cross captain killed over France in the war's last summer, the private whose name history kept for the worst three minutes of his life, the prisoner of war who came home to this city's name on his record. And it prints its negatives whole: the famous comedian a travel site assigns to Mishawaka who was never Mishawaka's, and the Medal of Honor the city, tested against the rolls, does not have. Where the record is thin, the entry is thin and says so. Where two sources give two dates, both stand.

The banked People file opens with the famous and carries the civic and business founders at pointer size only. This addendum reverses that order for the record it adds: it opens where the city opens, with the founders on both sides of the ground; it profiles the valley's Indigenous leaders whole; it carries every mayor as a person, with the succession's holes printed inside the profiles they affect; it names the November 2026 officeholders person by person; it gives the business founders their full People profiles; and it closes the leg with the long tail — the physicians, lawyers, architects, editors, tradespeople and officeholders the fame record never reaches, each carried by the record that names them.

The founding section carries the famous — the actors, the congressmen, the inventors. This addendum carries the city underneath them: the grocers and tailors, the bank cashiers and telephone agents, the men and women whose names survive in exactly one kind of record, a directory canvass, and nowhere in the fame legs at all. The sweep below reached 68 names, every one carried by a single published record — R. L. Polk & Co.'s Indiana Gazetteer and Business Directory for 1916–1917, in its Mishawaka entry — and every one checked against Notable People, Business Owners Directory and Public Servants and found absent there before it was entered here. The gazetteer's own headnote sizes the city they served: population 13,000, on the St. Joseph River and two railroads, with "2 banks, trust companies a weekly newspaper, the Enterprise" and its great manufactories. Three years on, Polk's 1921 directory would count 7,023 names in its Mishawaka canvass and reckon the population from them at 17,547. The 68 below are the long tail of the earlier count — entered at line size, with the trade and the address the record gives, because the record gives nothing more, and nothing more is invented.