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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 small: the annotation to the state's historical marker for the club puts attendance at 40,000 to 50,000 spectators a season in those years. The team's own history in this history calls the place "the Bendix corporation's grounds." In 1946 the club moved to Playland Park, beside the river, which the marker describes as "more centrally located and better-equipped" — a comparison that tells a reader Bendix Field was neither, and nothing else. Playland's site is known to the lot line: it is the ground now under Indiana University South Bend's River Crossing housing, and the marker stands near it. Bendix Field's site is known to nobody whose writing this history could reach.
The open question, exactly: where the diamond stood. The Airports section of this history put the question in its sharpest form and left it open there: whether the Blue Sox' Bendix Field stood on the airport's ground — Bendix Field was also the airport's name in those years, the field Vincent Bendix's name was on — or on a Bendix company recreation ground elsewhere in the city. The airport's histories, the authority's records and the airfield sources carry no ballpark. The league's records, the marker, the Players Association's team page and the published team history carry no location either: the name, the years, the crowds, and nothing to put a pin in. One more Bendix ground is in the record, and it does not close the question: the National Register documentation of the county's New Deal projects records that the city park now called Kennedy Park was known during the New Deal years as Bendix Park. So the documented record holds an airport named for Bendix, a city park that bore his name, and a ball field that bore it too — and no source reached joins any two of them. A professional ballpark that drew fifty thousand people a summer for three summers, in a city of a hundred thousand, has left its name in every account of the team and its ground in none of them. The question is printed open, with the airport reading and the company-ground reading both standing, because the record reached supports neither over the other and guesses are not printed in this history.
Sources:
- Indiana Historical Bureau, State Historical Marker 71.2021.1 (2021) and its annotation — the Blue Sox at Bendix Field 1943–45; attendance of 40,000–50,000 per season; Playland Park "more centrally located and better-equipped"; no location given for Bendix Field.
- This history, Airports section, "The Bendix Field ballpark question" — the airport record searched for the diamond; the question printed open in the terms used above.
- Indiana University South Bend news release, 26 May 2021 — the marker dedication at the Playland Park site; the Blue Sox' "first three years of competition at Bendix Field"; no site stated for it.
- Living New Deal, "Kennedy Park Improvements — South Bend, IN," after Glory-June Greiff, New Deal Work Relief Projects in St. Joseph County, Indiana (National Register MPDF, 2005) — the park "was known as Bendix Park during the New Deal." No source reached identifies that park with the ball field.