The Claims That Failed

Each tested whole in the file named · This entry is their index

The Shovel Slayer. The "South Bend Shovel Slayer" of neighborhood lore is a character from a film — the 1990 picture Home Alone — furnished by retelling with a Rum Village case that does not exist. Dispelled in the Serial Killers file, deliberately, so the dispel stands where a searcher will look.

The vanishing of Oliver Lerch. The city's famous disappearance — the man who vanished mid-errand, calling for help from the empty air — traces to Ambrose Bierce's fiction, "Charles Ashmore's Trail," and its ground is South Bend Township in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, not this city. Traced and corrected in the Unsolved Mysteries file, on the Tribune history column's own research through the library's Local & Family History Services.

The planted birth year. Motown's Junior Walker, raised in this city, carried a planted birth year of 1942 through decades of reference print; the documented year is 1931. Corrected in the Famous People file, where the screen and music claims of birth and formation are each printed at their documented strength — and where two circulating names fail the same test outright: Vivian Vance and Jan Hooks have no South Bend tie in the record, and are printed in that file as negatives so the claims die in print.

The invented founding. An aggregator's tale that the Potawatomi Zoo was founded on a tribal donation, with elephants the record does not contain, was identified and rejected in the Zoo file's research and named in its note so it is never re-harvested; the zoo's documented founding is a park-board minute and one deer.

The coaching stop that never was. Curly Lambeau's South Bend tie is real and small — one freshman season of 1918, the first touchdown of the Rockne era on the Tribune's record, gone by December with tonsillitis — and no South Bend coaching stop exists, though the tie is sometimes rounded into one. Printed at exact strength in the Halls of Fame file, beside the city's other exact-strength boundary: Adam Driver is Mishawaka's, raised there from seven and schooled there, and this city's files print him as the boundary, not the claim.

What the record leaves. A claims file that prints only its successes would be a booster sheet. These five failed in the digging, each in a different way — fiction furnished with a case, fiction furnished with a city, a publicity date furnished with a life, a fable furnished with a founding, a season furnished with a career — and they stand here together so that the failures are as findable as the verdicts that favor the city.

Sources

1. The Serial Killers file — the Shovel Slayer dispel.
2. The Unsolved Mysteries file — the Lerch tracing to Bierce and to Pennsylvania.
3. The Famous People file — Junior Walker's documented 1931; the Vance and Hooks negatives.
5. The Halls of Fame file — Lambeau's tie at exact strength; the Famous People file — Adam Driver boundary-printed to Mishawaka.