The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Mysteries: The Questions the Record Leaves Open
Every city's record has places where it stops, and an honest history prints the stopping places at the same size as the certainties. This section gathers South Bend's: the questions that have a documentary spine — a name in a newspaper, a line in a federal file, a verdict in an institution's own words — and no documented answer. A mystery qualifies here only if its openness is itself documented: the known facts must be statable exactly, and the end of the record must be markable in a source's own terms. Where a question put to the record turned out to have an answer, the answer is printed and the entry closes; where the record stays silent, the search that was made is printed with the silence, so a reader can see how hard the blank was pressed. Disappearances that are crimes belong to the Unsolved Mysteries section; stories the city tells belong to Folklore; the haunted lore belongs to Haunted Places. What follows is only what the documents raise and do not settle.
The Man in the Hall: Mike Muszar, 1917
Night of 18–19 August 1917
The documented facts: In the night of Saturday, 18 August 1917, Magyar Hall on Chapin Street — the Hungarian societies' hall, built in 1910, holding a theater, a dance floor, club rooms, a store and a saloon — burned. The South…
The Airman the War Never Gave Back: Hugh Maynard Burch
12 April 1951 — the case stands open
The documented facts: The Defense Department's casualty file for the Korean War, counted in full for this history, carries forty-three fatal casualties with St. Joseph County as home of record. One of the forty-three stands on a…
The Town at the Portage: A Place the Record Cannot Fix
1679 – 1718
The documented facts: When the written record of this ground opens, in December 1679, La Salle's party came up the river of the Miamis to a town of the Miami people near the carrying place — the portage from the St. Joseph to the…
The Ballpark No Map Keeps: Bendix Field
1943 – 1945
The documented facts: For three seasons, 1943 through 1945, the South Bend Blue Sox of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League played their home games at a ground every source calls Bendix Field. The crowds were not…
Why "Blue Sox"? The Worked Example of an Honest Blank
Spring 1943
The documented facts: Few foundings in this city's record are documented as closely as the Blue Sox'. The state historical marker's annotation rebuilds the spring of 1943 out of the South Bend Tribune 's own headlines: "Girls…
The Keepers of the Open File
1917 – today
Every mystery in this section has a custodian, and the section closes with them, because the openness of these questions is not neglect — it is, in each case, the present state of an institution's own record. The South Bend…
Bendix Field — the placement hardened to the far west side; the lot still unlocated
1943 – 1946
The banked gap: The Mysteries file leaves the Blue Sox' first home unlocated, and assembly was directed to state no location for it. This pass read the Indiana Historical Bureau's page for the South Bend Blue Sox marker (No.…