The city's own hall: the South Bend Community Hall of Fame

Begun 1986 · Century Center

The halls test finds one more hall seated in the city, and it is the city's own. The South Bend Community Hall of Fame was begun in 1986 by the South Bend Alumni Association — founded in 1985 to support the city's public schools — to recognize individuals whose accomplishments have left a lasting impact on South Bend; eligibility, in the association's published terms, asks for men and women who lived and worked in South Bend for ten or more years and stayed engaged with the community. Its plaques hang on the walls of Century Center — the same convention center the College Hall was built against — and its annual induction banquet is held there. By November 1994 the hall held forty-six members, Father Theodore Hesburgh among them. It is a civic roll, not a sporting one: its classes run from university presidents to Habitat for Humanity builders, and its football names enter this section only where the football record carries them — Ernie Zalejski, inducted in 2004, stands in both this hall and Richmond's. Father Edward "Monk" Malloy's induction at the nineteenth annual banquet in November 2005 is the documented measure of the hall's town-and-gown reach. The banquet series is current: the thirty-eighth annual dinner was held October 14, 2025, and the thirty-ninth on October 13, 2026, both at Century Center — the city's own hall, still enrolling, in the building the national hall left.

Sources:

1. Notre Dame Observer, November 22, 1994 — the hall begun in 1986, its forty-six members, the Alumni Association's operation of it, and the plaques on the walls of Century Center.
2. Notre Dame Observer, November 16, 2005 — the nineteenth annual banquet at Century Center and Father Malloy's induction, with the hall's purpose as the association states it.
3. Michiana Business News, January 16, 2024 — the Community Hall of Fame's nomination terms: ten or more years lived and worked in South Bend, and the Alumni Association's founding in 1985.
4. South Bend Tribune, Namely News, fall 2025, and the thirty-ninth annual banquet program, October 13, 2026 — the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth dinners at Century Center.
5. Sports Players record of this history — Ernie Zalejski's South Bend Hall of Fame induction of 2004.