South Bend Automobiles: The Other Marques, the Small Studebakers and the Headquarters Company

Automobiles · The other marques, the two small Studebakers, and the headquarters company

South Bend's automobile fame is one company's, and that company's record stands whole in the Studebaker section of this history. What stands here is everything else the record holds — and it is a stranger, more various record than the shadow of the wagon works suggests. Before Studebaker built a car of its own it bankrolled one of the largest and most expensive brass-era cars in America, the Tincher, and brought its maker here. In the same years two small South Bend shops of its own, Ricketts and its successor Diamond, built six-cylinder cars on patented crankshafts and sold them at prices the big makers noticed. The cars the city sold most widely in the brass era it did not build: the E-M-F and the Flanders were Detroit and Walkerville products that reached the world through South Bend's dealer network, South Bend's capital and, in the end, South Bend's nameplates. When the Studebaker Corporation did build small cars under other names, it built them in two cities at once — the Erskine chiefly at Detroit's Piquette Avenue plant, the Rockne split between Detroit and South Bend — and this section carries those two makes at production-record size, where the Studebaker section carries their stories. In 1934 the city's component giant, Bendix, secretly built one complete automobile to show off its parts, toured it through Europe's great factories, and lost it in a shed for thirty years. And since 1971 the city's second vehicle company, AM General, has been headquartered here while its civilian vehicles — the mail Jeeps, the Hummer line, the MV-1 — were built, in the main, across the line in Mishawaka; that boundary is printed exactly wherever it falls, because it is the fact that decides what belongs to this city's record and what belongs to Mishawaka's own. The enumeration that governs this section is the standard references': the marques seated in South Bend besides Studebaker are Tincher, Ricketts and Diamond, and no fourth name survives the test — a claim examined, and the near-misses disposed of, in the entries below.