Names that are not South Bend's — the negatives, printed where a reader looks

boundaries and rejected claims

Vivian Vance — no tie: The beloved Ethel Mertz of I Love Lucy is sometimes attached to this region in circulating lists. The record gives her no South Bend tie of any kind. She was born Vivian Roberta Jones on July 26, 1909, in Cherryvale, Kansas, and raised in Independence, Kansas, where she studied drama at the high school under Anna Ingleman — alongside her classmate William Inge. She won the first Emmy ever given for supporting actress (1954) and died on August 17, 1979. She is not South Bend's, and this section prints the negative rather than letting the claim ride.

Jan Hooks — no tie: The Saturday Night Live cast member (1986–1991) likewise appears in no documented South Bend record. Janet Vivian Hooks was born on April 23, 1957, in Decatur, Georgia, was raised in Decatur, and moved with her family to Fort Myers, Florida, in 1974. She died on October 9, 2014. Decatur's and Fort Myers' — not this city's.

Kenesaw Mountain Landis — one teenage job, no more: Baseball's first commissioner is Indiana's, but not South Bend's, and the honest boundary has a nuance the slogan misses. Landis was born on November 20, 1866, in Millville, Ohio, and raised at Delphi and then Logansport, Indiana — Logansport is where he was a court reporter and where his formation belongs. The record does place him briefly in this city: after leaving Logansport High School, the teenage Landis held a short job as a clerk in the South Bend courthouse. That is the entire tie — a boy's clerkship, measured in months, before the pre-law course at Cincinnati, the Chicago law degree, the federal bench for the Northern District of Illinois (1905–1922), and the commissionership (1920–1944) from which he expelled the Black Sox and ruled the game. South Bend prints the clerkship so the claim is neither inflated into a hometown nor erased into a falsehood: his record is Logansport's and Chicago's.

Adam Driver — Mishawaka's: The actor of Girls, Star Wars, and Marriage Story grew up ten minutes from this city's center — and across a municipal line this history respects. Driver was born on November 19, 1983, in California (Fontana in the standard references; some biographies give San Diego) and raised from the age of seven in Mishawaka, his mother's hometown, graduating from Mishawaka High School in 2001 before the Marine Corps and Juilliard. Mishawaka is a separate city and will have its own record in this project; its famous son stands there. He is printed here, once, so that no reader mistakes the boundary for an omission.

And Notre Dame's imports: The university's national figures who arrived famous or became famous in its service and belong to other hometowns — its presidents, scholars, and the athletes and coaches of the Sports record beyond the one cross-reference this section carries for Rockne — stand in the Notre Dame and Sports records, where the institution's own account of them lives. This section claims for South Bend only what South Bend demonstrably gave.

Sources:

1. Standard biographical records of Vance and Hooks — the Kansas and Georgia births and raisings, the careers, the deaths; no South Bend connection in any record examined.
2. Landis biographies — the Millville birth, the Logansport formation, the South Bend courthouse clerkship as a teenager, the Chicago bench and commissionership.
3. Standard biographical record of Driver — the California birth, the Mishawaka raising from age seven, Mishawaka High School (2001).