Nine days in December · the announcement that ended the automobile century

9–20 DECEMBER 1963

The firm's record of the closing is Studebaker's to tell; what follows is the city's event: On Monday, 9 December 1963, Studebaker's board voted to close the South Bend plant and consolidate automobile production at Hamilton, Ontario. The news reached South Bend through its own newspaper: Tribune reporter Jack Colwell broke the story, and the evening edition's front page carried it in thick capitals — "AUTO OUTPUT TO END HERE." Sixty-one years of automobile production in South Bend were over in one headline, though parts work and military truck production continued for a time. The next day, in New York, the company's chairman, Randolph Guthrie, told a press conference that Studebaker had lost $40 million since 1959. Some 7,000 people still worked at the plant — down from close to 24,000 in 1950. Studebaker was the largest employer in St. Joseph County, and the blow did not fall evenly: close to a quarter of the workforce was African-American, and it fell hardest on Black South Bend, a generation into factory wages.

The city answered within two days: On 11 December, community leaders met to plan for the company's facilities, and Paul D. Gilbert, president of Gilbert's men's clothing store, gave the meeting the sentence the city has quoted since: "This is not Studebaker, Indiana. This is South Bend, Indiana. We're going to come out of this bigger and better than we ever were." President Johnson ordered a federal committee under his secretaries of labor and commerce to answer for the workers. Frank J. Bruggner was mayor when the story broke; Lloyd M. Allen took office on 1 January 1964 with the wreck on his desk, and the fifty-year governmental answer that followed — the commissions, the redevelopment, the remaking of the works themselves — is Government's to tell. The measured shock is in the Tribune's figures: unemployment stood at 2.1 percent in November 1963, hit 9 percent in early 1964, and was back to 2.6 percent by September 1965 as other employers absorbed the workforce.

The ending itself took eleven days: Production ran out the calendar. The last Larks and Hawks were assembled on Friday, 20 December 1963 — a Bordeaux Red 1964 Lark Daytona hardtop came off the end of the main line and the line stopped; the car is held by the Studebaker National Museum. The last Avantis followed on 26 December. Military trucks and Zip Van mail trucks were built on into early 1964 to complete federal contracts, and the engine foundry stayed open until the union contract expired in May 1964. The archivist Dave Beckman's measure of the event, quoted in the Studebaker section of this history, is the one this section adopts: "The healing took decades." The unemployment rate recovered in twenty-one months. The city underneath it — its population, its downtown, its sense of what it was — did not recover on that schedule, and the rest of this history is largely the record of that slower reckoning.

Sources:

1. This build's Studebaker section (article "December 1963: the closing of the South Bend works"), from the South Bend Tribune's reporting of December 1963 and after — the board's vote of 9 December, Colwell's story and the front page, Guthrie's statement of 10 December, the community meeting of 11 December and Gilbert's sentence, the last cars of 20 and 26 December, the foundry's operation to May 1964, and the unemployment figures (2.1 percent in November 1963; 9 percent in early 1964; 2.6 percent by September 1965); Beckman: "The healing took decades."
2. This build's Spine — the 7,000 still employed against close to 24,000 in 1950, the workforce nearly a quarter African-American, and President Johnson's federal committee; this build's Government section — Mayor Bruggner in office at the announcement, Mayor Allen taking office 1 January 1964.