Jordan: the Nash salesman on Jefferson Boulevard

1947-1949 - present

The founding, printed as a bracket: Jordan Kapson started in the car business in 1946 selling Nash Ramblers, and founded the group that bore his name in Mishawaka. Two dates stand in the record for the start, and this section prints both. The house's own history says its Ford store has been in the same location, 609 East Jefferson Boulevard, since 1947, on the corner of Jefferson and Cedar, where it counts sixty-five years and more. The trade press, reporting the group's sale sixty-nine years later, says the group was started in 1949 by Jordan Kapson. A man can hold a corner two years before the group that grew from it is counted as founded, and the record has no document to close the gap, so the founding stands as the bracket 1947 to 1949, with the corner dated by the house and the group dated by the trade, exactly as Fort Wayne's Bob Thomas founding stands on its bracket.

The family era: What Kapson built consisted, at his death, of Ford, Toyota, Scion and Volvo franchises, the Ford store on its Jefferson corner and the Toyota store down the same boulevard at 920 East Jefferson. He was born in Chicago, created the Jordan Kapson Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Notre Dame and the Bette Kapson Sanctuary Fund at Temple Beth-El in South Bend, and died in March 2006, at 82, chairman of the Jordan Automotive Network. His son Craig Kapson, the group's president, succeeded him. A Lexus store joined the group on Grape Road, at 4325 North Grape Road in Mishawaka, and has served there more than twenty-five years. The family era runs, on any reading of the bracket, close to seventy years: a Nash salesman's postwar start grown into a multi franchise group on two corridors, under a father and then a son.

The closing line: In August 2016 RFJ Auto Partners closed on the Jordan Automotive Group and its Ford and Toyota dealerships in Mishawaka; Craig Kapson had decided to sell a couple of years before, the trade press reported. The Jordan stores passed in time from RFJ to Sonic Automotive, under which Jordan Ford and Jordan Toyota trade today, still on Jefferson Boulevard, the Ford store on the corner it has held since the 1940s. The date of that second transfer is not fixed in the sources found, and it is carried as an open item. What is not open is the shape of the whole: founded by Jordan Kapson in the first years after the war, family run for two generations, sold in 2016, and still selling Fords on the same Mishawaka corner where the house dates its beginning to 1947.

Sources:

1. Automotive Fleet, In Memoriam: Jordan Kapson, 7 March 2006 (the 1946 Nash start, the founding, the Ford, Toyota, Scion and Volvo franchises, Craig Kapson's presidency, the Notre Dame chair and Temple Beth-El fund).
2. Jordan Ford, the house's About page (the same location at 609 E. Jefferson Blvd. since 1947; the Jefferson and Cedar corner and its sixty-five years).
3. The Banks Report, 30 August 2016 (the RFJ Auto Partners closing on the Jordan group; the group started in 1949 by Jordan Kapson; Craig's decision to sell).
4. Jordan Lexus of Mishawaka, the house's About page (more than twenty-five years on Grape Road); the Jordan houses' current pages (trading as Sonic Automotive companies; the second transfer's date unfixed in the sources found).