Told often, checked in the ledger

THE CLAIMS THIS SECTION DOES NOT RETELL

South Bend's most-repeated oddities are worked in full — telling, teller and record side by side — in the Stories Told and Folklore sections of this history, and are entered here in one line each so this drawer is complete. In Stories Told: that Coquillard founded the city (Navarre came first); that the Potawatomi Zoo is the oldest zoo in Indiana (it survives only as the oldest continuously operating one, on the zoo's own correction); that Studebaker was "the largest vehicle house in the world" (its own billing by 1872); "the wagon that won the Boer War"; Oliver's "Plowmaker to the World"; Singer's "three-quarters of the world's sewing-machine cabinets" (one attributed estimate); "Bendix made 75 percent of America's wartime avionics" (not supported) and "Bendix invented the electric starter" (it fails); "Notre Dame invented the forward pass"; the Touchdown Jesus mural and its stones; "eleven national championships" (a number that is a convention); the Dyngus Day superlatives, largest and second-largest (neither supported as settled); and "the data city." In Stories Told's index of the claims that failed: the South Bend Shovel Slayer, a character from the film Home Alone furnished by retelling with a case that does not exist; the vanishing of Oliver Lerch, traced to Ambrose Bierce's fiction and to South Bend Township, Pennsylvania; Junior Walker's planted birth year; the fable of the zoo's founding by tribal donation; and Curly Lambeau's South Bend coaching stop, which never was.

In Folklore: Sheggwe, the river's first name, and the man who appeared like a mushroom; Simon Pokagon's printed legends; the rumpus over how South Bend stayed South Bend; Wheelbarrow Johnny; the growth of "Win one for the Gipper"; the drink that never named Rum Village; the Polish names — Złote Góry, Warszawa, Krakówo, Bogdarka; and the girlfriend who never was. The city's ghosts stand in Haunted Places, and its two open documentary puzzles — the unlocated Bendix Field ballpark and the vanishing of Mike Muszar — in Mysteries. Each of those entries prints what is told and what the record shows, and leaves the two side by side — which is this section's whole method, applied at length there.

Sources:

1. The Stories Told section of this history — the claim-ledger whole, and its index of the claims that failed (the Shovel Slayer; Oliver Lerch; Junior Walker's birth year; the zoo founding fable; the Lambeau coaching stop), with the Serial Killers, Unsolved Mysteries, Famous People, Zoo and Halls of Fame sections named there as their homes; the Folklore section — the tales named, each with its papers; the Haunted Places and Mysteries sections.