Robert Kennedy's two South Bend days, 1968

April 4 and April 15, 1968 · the Stepan Center; the courthouse; the West Side Democratic Club

April 4: the campaign opens here: Indiana was Robert Kennedy's first primary, and South Bend was his first Indiana stop. On Thursday, April 4, 1968, about a thousand people met his plane at the airport — the Tribune reported the crowd "screamed" and "squealed" as he got off with Ethel — and at Notre Dame's Stepan Center, a hall of 3,800 seats, an estimated 5,000 students crammed inside with another thousand outside, some climbing onto the roof to see him arrive; The Observer's headline the next morning read "Kennedy Kicks Off Ind Campaign." He spoke more than forty minutes, on feeding America's hungry. He went on to Ball State, and that night in Indianapolis he was told Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot, and gave the speech announcing it to a crowd on a cold street corner — the day that began in the Stepan Center ended as one of the famous days in American politics, and its South Bend hours are the first of it.

April 15: Dyngus Day: Eleven days later Kennedy came back for the city's own political festival, Dyngus Day — the institution is told in its own entry below — and made it his. Jack Colwell's contemporary estimates in the Tribune, as recalled in WCMU's fiftieth-anniversary account, put the crowd at his courthouse speech at over six thousand, with more than fifteen hundred more inside the West Side Democratic Club; he marched in the day's parade, greeted crowds in the hall, and led the singing of "Sto Lat," the Polish well-wishing song, with his brother-in-law, Prince Stanisław Radziwiłł, beside him. The Polish precincts of the city gave him more than sixty percent of their vote, and on May 7 he won Indiana — his first primary, and his first victory. The crowd figures are the Tribune's estimates of the day, printed as the Tribune's.

Sources:

1. The Observer (Notre Dame), April 5, 1968 — "Kennedy Kicks Off Ind Campaign": the Stepan Center crowd and the airport stop.
2. Notre Dame Magazine — the airport thousand, the 3,800 seats against 5,000 inside and 1,000 outside, as the Tribune reported them.
3. WCMU Public Media, "Dyngus Day and Bobby Kennedy," April 2018 — Jack Colwell's Tribune estimates: over 6,000 at the courthouse, 1,500-plus in the West Side Democratic Club, the Radziwiłł visit, and the Polish-precinct vote.