The engineer, the Depression, the war, and the deaths in office

1914 – 1964

Fred W. Keller (1914–1918): Keller was a German Township farm boy who became a civil engineer — assistant county engineer, then city engineer — and in 1913 he ran for mayor as an independent, outside both parties, and won. The roster remembers him as the city's Independent; South Bend remembered him, in the end, for something else entirely. After his term he co-founded the real-estate firm of Whitcomb & Keller, which built more than 3,200 houses in two dozen subdivisions across the city and earned him the name "Mr. Real Estate"; the firm donated most of the land for the northwest-side park that bears his name, Keller Park, and the neighborhood took the name with it. His one term is the exception that proves the era's rule — and his houses, more than his ordinances, are his monument in the city.

Carson, Seebirt, Montgomery (1918–1930): Franklin R. Carson took office in January 1918, in the Great War's last year; Eli F. Seebirt and Chester R. Montgomery followed, four years each, through the Studebaker boom of the twenties. The record reached for this section carries their tenures at roster size, and they are printed at that size.

William Riley Hinkle (1930–1935) and George W. Freyermuth (1935–1938): Hinkle took office as the Depression took the city. His five years span the collapse of the great payrolls — Studebaker into receivership and out, the banks failing and reopening — and the first federal relief years; Freyermuth, a Republican elected in the depth of the Democratic decade, held the office three years on the same hard ground. The city they governed was being kept, not built, and their profiles stand at the size the surviving general record gives them.

Jesse I. Pavey (1938–1945): Pavey's seven years made him the mayor of the arsenal years. Studebaker built truck engines and the great Wright Cyclone aircraft engines on Chippewa Avenue; the plants ran around the clock; the city's population climbed toward its peak. Pavey governed the war boomtown to V-J Day, and handed the office to F. Kenneth Dempsey in 1945 — the first of two quick successions, Dempsey to George A. Schock in 1947, whose causes the general record reached for this section does not state; the tenures are printed as the roster carries them.

George A. Schock (1947–1952) and John Alden Scott (1952–1956): Schock's five years and Scott's single Republican term cover the postwar building boom — the subdivisions rising at the city's edges, Edison Park and Miami Hills laid out in the early fifties on land inside the limits — in the decade when South Bend reached its greatest population, 132,445 in the census of 1960's approach. Scott (1916–1986) was the last Republican to hold the office before the partisan ground shifted entirely; a generation later there would be one more.

Edward F. Voorde (1956–1960): Voorde, a Democrat, took office on 1 January 1956 and was re-elected in 1959. He governed a city that still believed its industrial base was permanent — his recorded warning, in a Tribune interview of 18 May 1960, was about the tax base and the suburbs, not about Studebaker. On 2 September 1960, ten months into his second term, Edward F. Voorde was killed in an automobile accident — the only South Bend mayor to die in office. The office passed to his city controller.

Frank J. Bruggner (1960–1964): Bruggner (1891–1972), the controller, assumed the mayoralty, in the election record's phrase, reluctantly, and served out the term without seeking election to it. His administration's place in the city's story was fixed in its last three weeks: on 9 December 1963 the South Bend Tribune broke the story that Studebaker would close its South Bend works, and the contemporary press photographed the seventy-two-year-old acting mayor at the table where the first plans were laid to find work for the thousands about to be idled. He handed the office, and the crisis entire, to the man who had beaten his party three weeks earlier at the polls.

Sources:

1. Aaron Helman, South Bend News-Times (November 2026), the Keller Park account — Keller's engineering career, the independent run of 1913, Whitcomb & Keller's 3,200 houses and the "Mr. Real Estate" name.
2. The History Museum's list of mayors and the mayoral-election record — the tenures of Carson, Seebirt, Montgomery, Hinkle, Freyermuth, Pavey, Dempsey, Schock and Scott; Voorde's term from 1 January 1956 and his death in office; the 1963 election account — Bruggner "reluctantly assumed the office after Edward F. Voorde's death in an automobile accident."
3. Eugene Register-Guard, 15 December 1963 (Associated Press) — Mayor Bruggner at the first planning for the idled Studebaker workers; the payroll dwindled from 23,000 to 7,000.
4. Joe Molnar, "More People" (West SB) — Voorde's 18 May 1960 Tribune warning on the tax base; the postwar subdivisions inside the city limits.