The war years: the showrooms empty

1942 - 1945

The freeze: The dealer trade's hardest years came not from any failure of demand but from an order. On 2 January 1942 the Indianapolis Times carried the Office of Production Management's ruling under the headline "Sales of New Autos Halted": no dealer could legally sell a new vehicle, not even the cars standing in show windows and warehouses, and the roughly 450,000 new cars then in dealers' hands across the country were frozen for the government to ration to essential users. Production of all cars was to end within thirty days. It did: on 9 February 1942, under the War Production Board's order, the last civilian car came off an American line at Ford's River Rouge plant, and no new model years followed until the war was won.

The squeeze, in Indiana numbers: What that meant on the ground is measurable. A National Automobile Dealers Association survey published in June 1943 counted Indiana's passenger car registrations fallen from 796,533 in May 1942 to 723,131 a year later, the fleet shrinking under gas and tire rationing, with no new cars to replace the ones wearing out. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's April 1942 review of the Seventh District, Indiana's district, recorded that the automobile industry's shift to war production had already brought considerable idleness to the district, and that the dealers nationally were asking the government to form a corporation to buy up their frozen stocks at a price midway between the manufacturers' and retail prices, the trade trying to be bought out of inventory it was forbidden to sell. A South Bend house in those years sold almost nothing new. It lived on its service department, its parts counter, its used car lot, and repair work on a fleet the whole country was nursing along.

Who spans the war: Lafayette Boulevard spans it in a row. Romy Hammes had bought the Ford dealership in 1940, some twenty months before the freeze stopped him selling what he had bought the store to sell, and the store's measure is that it was still there, six years on, to be written up in Life as a success story the year after the war ended. Feferman, standing since 1928, spans it. Freeman-Spicer, selling the hometown Studebakers, spans it, in a city whose factory turned wholly to war work. And Gates, founded in Plymouth in 1928, spans it from the regional side. The war is the hinge of this section here as in Fort Wayne: the trade that came back in 1946 came back to a seller's market, and the houses that had a building, a franchise and a reputation when the freeze came were the ones positioned to survive it and to meet what came after, which in South Bend included the hardest thing any dealer town has faced, the loss of its own factory.

Sources:

1. Indianapolis Times, 2 January 1942 (Hoosier State Chronicles).
2. Decatur Daily Democrat, 21 June 1943 (the NADA registration survey, United Press).
3. War Production Board order of February 1942 and the River Rouge last car record, as carried in the standard wartime automotive histories.
4. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Seventh District review, April 1942.