Feferman: a Cadillac store run by four brothers

1928 - late 1970s

The house: Feferman Cadillac Oldsmobile, formerly Feferman Motors, was a General Motors dealership owned by the Feferman family, and it stood in South Bend from 1928. The family owned it until the late 1970s: a fifty year run, from the year before the Crash to the end of the big car era, selling the top of the General Motors line, Cadillac, with Oldsmobile beside it. Four Feferman brothers, Max, Ben, Ruben and Jacob, were involved in the business, and the second generation followed the trade's usual course through an unusual family depth: Henry Feferman, Ben's son, later took over the business and was prominent in the community from his high school years onward. The Michiana Jewish Historical Society records the house as one of several Jewish owned car dealerships in South Bend, a thread of the city's commercial history that the society's markers exist to keep.

The President's Cadillac: The house's most durable picture is not of its showroom but of its product at work. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited South Bend, he rode in a Cadillac specifically designed to hide his leg braces, and Ben Feferman used the photograph of that visit for his Christmas card in 1935-36. A dealer whose cars carried a president through his own city, and who sent the picture to his customers at Christmas, understood the trade's first rule in the same way Fort Wayne's Jim Kelley would state it a generation later: the customer became a friend, and the friend became a customer. The record gives the Feferman house its dates, its brothers and its marques. Its street address is not fixed by the sources found, and none is printed; the society's record says the dealership stood at its marker site, and the address is carried in this section's open items for the directory pass that will fix it.

Sources:

1. Michiana Jewish Historical Society, Feferman Cadillac Oldsmobile (the 1928 standing, the family ownership to the late 1970s, the General Motors marques, the house's place among the city's Jewish owned dealerships).
2. Michiana Jewish Historical Society, Finding South Bend's Jewish History series, 24 August 2021 (the four brothers, Henry Feferman's succession, the Roosevelt Cadillac photograph and the 1935-36 Christmas card, from Anne Feferman's firsthand account).