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1929 · THE TESTING COURSE
The vehicle was licensed a generation before the driver was: Indiana's first law governing the licensing of drivers is the Act of March 13, 1929, chapter 162 — the Indiana Supreme Court, reciting the history in 2018, dates the whole modern scheme from it: licensing application and renewal procedures, "certain standards for driving competency," and grounds for suspension, all in the 1929 act. In this county the beat ran through the county seat's rooms: the first operator's licenses held by South Bend drivers issued across the branch's counter in the years after 1929, in the rooms the succession article traces. The first issuances at documented size — how many St. Joseph County motorists held operator's licenses in 1929, or 1939 — are not carried in any record reached; the Secretary of State's reports and the Tribune's files are the named settlers, and the gap stands in the closing article.
By the 1940s the operator's license was a Bureau-issued card, renewed at the branches; surviving 1943 and 1944 Indiana operator's licenses from the neighboring county to the northwest show the Bureau's name on the card and a fifty-cent fee — regional ephemera, printed at that strength as the texture of what a South Bend driver's wallet held. Through the patronage decades the license side of this counter ran with the plate side: the same party-appointed manager, the same downtown room, the January plate rush and the year-round license trade sharing one staff — the clerks the directories scatter through their pages, "clk Auto License Bur" after name after South Bend name, are that staff, and their entries are the branch's payroll preserved by accident.
The testing course, on this ground, folds into the branch as it does everywhere in the modern system: written and road examinations are branch services, given inside the branches, and the county seat's full-service branch has been the county's principal examining room in every era the record describes — the counter a new driver in South Bend has always been sent to. No record reached seats a separate testing station — a state-police or examiner's post — inside the city in any era apart from the branch itself; the negative prints at that strength. Before the examinations folded into the branches, the course of driver examination in this county — who examined, and where — is a named gap, with the Bureau's and the State Police's records and the press of record as settlers.
Principal sources: Act of March 13, 1929, ch. 162, as recited by the Indiana Supreme Court (2018); Polk city directories of South Bend, 1949–1987 (the branch staff's entries); 1943–44 Indiana operator's licenses (regional ephemera, at that strength); Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles, branch record (the modern branch's services).