Hinkle and Hammes: the Ford store on Lafayette

1911 - 1974

The Studebaker man who sold Fords: William Riley Hinkle acquired the Ford dealership in South Bend in 1911. He came to it from inside the hometown industry: among the jobs he had worked before the dealership was one in the sales office of the Studebaker Manufacturing Company. In 1922 he had a two story automobile showroom and garage built for the dealership at 225 North Lafayette, designed by local architect Noel S. Dunbar, with the display floor at street level and servicing on the second story, the standard plan of the era's urban dealership, when land was dear and cars went up a ramp to be repaired. Hinkle's standing in the city outgrew the store: he was appointed to the Board of Works, became its president, and in 1930 was elected Mayor of South Bend. He retired from the automobile dealership in 1938. A Ford dealer who had started in Studebaker's sales office and ended in the mayor's office is as complete a specimen of the row's first generation as the record offers.

The man from Kankakee: In 1940 the building and the Ford dealership were purchased by Romy Hammes, an automobile dealer from Kankakee, Illinois. The Hammes family archive dates the opening precisely, to 1 April 1940, and places the first location of Romy Hammes Ford Lincoln Mercury at 219-223 Lafayette Boulevard South, purchased from Holy Cross and Nye, later relocated next door; the university record ties the 1940 purchase to the Hinkle building at 225 North Lafayette. The two records are printed together, addresses and all, and the leg does not pretend they describe the purchase in identical terms: between them they fix the year, the seller's trade and the street beyond argument, and the exact first door is left where the two accounts leave it. Hammes had been preparing for the store since he was sixteen, when he went to work for the Ford dealer Harry Dahl in La Crosse, Wisconsin; by 1926 he had won a nationwide Ford sales contest by selling 107 Model Ts and been offered a dealership of his own, choosing Kankakee. In September 1946 the country read about him: Life magazine's issue of 23 September 1946 carried a long article on Romy Hammes and his success, picturing him with an architectural drawing of 225 North Lafayette and the addition he proposed for it. A South Bend Ford store had become a national success story six years after its buyer arrived.

The Olive Street years and the end: Romy's son Jerry Hammes continued the dealership at Lafayette into the 1960s, then moved it to Olive Street in the middle of that decade. The federal record carries the store's last chapter in findings of fact. The United States Tax Court, in Romy Hammes, Inc. v. Commissioner, recorded that the family's South Bend operating corporation sold Ford automobiles and trucks at retail at 244 South Olive Street, on premises the family's real estate company had built as an automobile agency facility on the old Singer manufacturing property, acquired in 1955, and that the dealership was sold in 1974. So the Ford store that Hinkle founded on the row in 1911, and Hammes made famous in 1946, closes its documented course sixty-three years on: dealership founded 1911, showroom built 1922, bought 1940, national magazine cover story 1946, sold 1974. Romy Hammes himself died in December 1981, at 81, his name by then on buildings far from any showroom. Few houses in either city's leg are documented at every hinge of their lives. This one is.

Sources:

1. Building South Bend, University of Notre Dame, property ND-SB-00262 (the 1911 acquisition, the Studebaker sales office, the 1922 building and architect, the mayoralty, the 1938 retirement, the 1940 Hammes purchase, the Life article of 23 September 1946).
2. Hammes family archive, jerryhammes.com (the 1 April 1940 first location and the Holy Cross and Nye purchase; the Romy Hammes biography, 1900-1981, the Dahl apprenticeship and the 107 Model Ts; the South Bend Tribune of 24 February 2014 on Jerry Hammes and the Olive Street move).
3. United States Tax Court, Romy Hammes, Inc. v. Commissioner, docket 7444-73, filed 13 September 1977 (the 244 South Olive Street dealership, the Singer property, the 1974 sale).
4. Kathlyn Hammes Mowbray obituary, Las Vegas Review-Journal, 19 February 2017 (the father's 1940 acquisition of the South Bend Ford dealership).