Two of Bock's crowns that cannot be tested — the mats and the raincoats

Milton Bock's company history, 1937

The claims. Milton Bock's "Ball Band History Parallels Story of Mishawaka Growth," the company's history published in the South Bend Tribune in 1937 and quoted throughout this history's Ball Band flagship, carries two superlatives the flagship prints at his statement strength. The first: that when the Mishawaka works entered automobile-mat production in 1933, it became "the largest single source of automobile mats in the world." The second, of the same Depression years: that the Mishawaka plant carried the only raincoat production in the whole United States Rubber Company. Both claims are about rank inside an industry and inside a corporation, and both are printed here together because they share a disposition.

The record. The products are real, and the flagship carries them at their documented size: the works did make automobile mats, and it did make raincoats — in the Second World War it put raincoats on soldiers by the documented contract, as the flagship's war record shows. The ranks are another matter. No enumeration of automobile-mat manufacture by maker exists in the record reached — the Census of Manufactures' rubber-products tables never broke the product out by firm — and the internal division of product lines inside United States Rubber in 1933 survives, if anywhere, in the company's own records: the United States Rubber and Uniroyal papers at the Hagley Museum and Library are the named settling source for both claims, and they were not reached. There is no test to run, and this section does not invent one.

The verdict. Untestable, and printed as untestable — the claims carried at Bock's strength, as the flagship carries them, with the settling record named. They belong to the same decade and the same genre as the crowns tested above, and they are kept at the same arm's length: a company history written for the hometown paper in 1937 is a claimant, not a census. What stands without them is the works' documented scale in those years — forty-three acres, a dozen product lines, five thousand people — which the flagship states from the record and which needs no rank to be the largest fact in the city.

Sources:

1. Milton Bock, "Ball Band History Parallels Story of Mishawaka Growth," South Bend Tribune, 1937 — both claims as printed; the history's early line ("Between '67 and '86, blankets and felt boots were its only products") and the works' course as the flagship quotes him.
2. This history's Ball Band flagship — the automobile-mat and raincoat lines at their documented size; the wartime raincoat production on the contract record.
3. Named as the settling source, not reached: the United States Rubber Company / Uniroyal records, Hagley Museum and Library — the corporation's product-division record for the 1930s.