The marshals and the first chiefs: the police before Bolerjack

1899 – 1949

The elected marshals: The charter city policed itself through an elected marshal, and Howard's rosters name the office's first holders as they name the clerks: Grant Needham, marshal in 1899 and 1900; Jerome Rossman in 1902; Frederick Stockberger in 1904; Benjamin F. Jarrett in November 1905. The marshal was a politician's office — elected on the ticket, changed with the administrations — and the four names across six years are the whole of the marshal line the sources read for this section carry; the Fire & Safety section's founding anchor owns the office's institutional course, and the town marshals before 1899 stand in that file's and this section's shared gap, the council records at the Hesburgh Libraries named to settle both.

The undated chief and the directory's chief: Somewhere in the years after Jarrett the marshal's office gave way to an appointed chief of police, and the record reaches two chiefs before the directory era settles. One is documented without dates anywhere: Robert Oscar Fitzsimmons, a former sandlot ballplayer who "rose to the rank of chief of police in the town," in the Society for American Baseball Research's biography of his son Freddie, the knuckleball pitcher born in Mishawaka on 26 July 1901 and raised here while his father held the office at some point in the boy's youth. The Fire & Safety section prints Fitzsimmons in the succession with his place in the order unsettled, and this section adds only the person's frame the biography gives: a ballplayer who became the town's chief, whose son became one of the century's famous pitchers — the chief's own years the directories of 1900–1925 and the Board of Public Safety minutes would settle. The second is the 1921 directory's: Valentine J. Pfender, chief of police, with the Jarretts under him in the department the Fire & Safety section describes — a surname echoing the last marshal's, Benjamin F. Jarrett, across the office's change of form, printed as the record gives it and as nothing more. Between Pfender in 1921 and the chief of 1949 the line is unlit in the sources read; the gap is the same one the Fire & Safety section names, and the directories that fill its Mishawaka half are the ones this history could not reach for the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1 — marshals Grant Needham (1899, 1900), Jerome Rossman (1902), Frederick Stockberger (1904), Benjamin F. Jarrett (1905).
2. Society for American Baseball Research, biography of Freddie Fitzsimmons (Gregory H. Wolf), as carried in the Fire & Safety section — Robert Oscar Fitzsimmons "rose to the rank of chief of police in the town," undated.
3. R. L. Polk & Co., South Bend City Directory (1921), Mishawaka section — Chief of Police V. J. Pfender.