The civic builders: the bank, the foundation, the tire store, and the 29-year-old mayor

1926 – present

Ernestine Morris Carmichael Raclin (1927–2023): the city's first woman of finance, and Notre Dame's first female trustee. Raised in South Bend — daughter of E. M. Morris, of the Morris banking line — "Ernie" Raclin became chairman of 1st Source Bank, and from that chair ran a second career of firsts: among the first women elected to Notre Dame's Board of Trustees (1976), the first woman to run a major Notre Dame fundraising campaign, the first woman in the country to lead a United Way campaign, and the first woman to serve on United Way's national board. She was a founding member of WNIT public television and of the Stanley Clark School, chaired Project Future, the region's economic development agency, and gave the lead gift — with her daughter Carmi and son-in-law Chris Murphy — for the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art at Notre Dame's entrance, which opened in late November 2023. She died in 2023, aged 95, months before the museum that bears her name opened. IU South Bend's school of the arts also bears her name. Her son-in-law, Chris Murphy (Notre Dame, class of 1968), stands in the record as president, chairman, and chief executive of 1st Source Bank, the institution her family built into the region's largest local bank.

Judd Leighton: the banker whose foundation rebuilt a campus. Born in South Bend, Leighton took a liberal arts degree at Northwestern and a law degree there in 1947 after Navy service, clerked in Washington, and came home to careers in business and banking. In 2000 he established the Judd Leighton Foundation to fund the community's educational, health-care, and economic initiatives; he was a founding board member of the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County and a trustee of Project Future and of Memorial Hospital. In 2012 Indiana University South Bend named its school of business and economics for him, on his foundation's four-million-dollar gift — the largest single donor gift in the campus's history to that date. His birth and death dates are not given in the sources read for this section, and the entry does not supply them; the campus on Mishawaka Avenue that carries his name is the public fact.

Peter Veldman (1926–2014): the immigrant who out-sold the tire business. Born on 4 April 1926 at Didam, in the Netherlands, Veldman immigrated to the United States in 1949 and served in the U.S. Army in the Korean War (1950–52), where he received his automotive training. From 1956 he ran a Standard Oil service station on South Bend's west side — pumping gas, checking oil, changing and balancing tires — and built it into Veldman's Service Center; by the 1970s his station sold more tires than any other in northern Indiana. In 1979, after his son-in-law Mike Joines could not find tires for an Opel Manta sports coupe, Veldman and Joines founded the Tire Rack as a South Bend retail store; it became, by mail order and then online, the largest tire seller of its kind in the world, headquartered in South Bend. Veldman was inducted into the Tire Industry Association's Hall of Fame in 2012 and died in South Bend on 3 March 2014, a month short of 88; Joines succeeded him as president. (One trade summary dates the founding to Indianapolis; the obituary record, the company's own history, and the industry press place the 1979 founding in South Bend, and this section follows them.)

Pete Buttigieg (born 1982): at public-record size. Born in South Bend on 19 January 1982, Buttigieg was educated at Harvard and at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, served as a Navy Reserve intelligence officer with a deployment to Afghanistan in 2014, and was elected mayor of his home city at 29 — the mayoralty itself, 2012 to 2020, stands in the Government section. His 2020 presidential campaign and his service as U.S. Secretary of Transportation (February 2021 to January 2025) made him the most nationally visible South Bend native of his generation. He is a living person and appears here only as the public record states him. His successor as mayor, James Mueller (born 1982), his former chief of staff, is carried at roster size in the Government section.

Sources:

1. Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame — the commemorative issue (2023–24) and the museum's death announcement: Raclin's 1927–2023 dates, the South Bend upbringing, the 1st Source chairmanship, the Notre Dame trusteeship of 1976 and the campaign firsts, the United Way firsts, the founding memberships, and Chris Murphy's offices at 1st Source.
2. Indiana University, University Honors and Awards — Judd Leighton's South Bend birth, the Northwestern law degree of 1947, the foundation of 2000, the founding Community Foundation board seat, and the 2012 naming and four-million-dollar gift.
3. Judd Leighton Foundation — the founder's board service, including Memorial Health System and Project Future.
4. Modern Tire Dealer (March 2014) and the South Bend Tribune obituary via Legacy.com — Veldman's birth on 4 April 1926 at Didam, the 1949 immigration, the Korean War service, the 1956 South Bend station and Veldman's Service Center, the 1979 Tire Rack founding with Mike Joines, the 2012 Hall of Fame induction, and the death on 3 March 2014.
5. Government section of this history (banked) — Buttigieg's mayoralty and Mueller's succession; the public record of the Rhodes Scholarship, the 2014 Afghanistan deployment, and the Secretary of Transportation service, 2021–25.