December 1963: the closing of the South Bend works

December 1963 – May 1964

The announcement: The 1964 models sold insufficiently from their introduction, and Egbert was ousted from the presidency (Byers Burlingame succeeded him in November 1963). On Monday, 9 December 1963, the board voted to close the South Bend plant and consolidate automobile production at Hamilton, Ontario. The news reached the city through its own paper: Tribune reporter Jack Colwell broke the story, and the evening edition's front page carried it in thick capitals — "AUTO OUTPUT TO END HERE," "Studebaker will assemble cars in Canada" — with his report that Studebaker would end 61 years of automotive production in South Bend while parts work and military truck production continued locally for some time. The next day, 10 December, the company's chairman, Randolph Guthrie, told a New York press conference that Studebaker had lost $40 million since 1959.

The last cars: Production ran out the calendar. The last Larks and Hawks were assembled on Friday, 20 December 1963 — a red Daytona hardtop came off the end of the main line and the line stopped, in the account of the building's later history; the car survives in the Studebaker National Museum's keeping. The encyclopedia account carries the assembly of the last Avanti to 26 December. What continued was the government work: military trucks and the Zip Van mail trucks were built into early 1964 to complete federal contracts, and the engine foundry stayed open until the union contract expired in May 1964, its stock of engines supporting the Zip Van run and Canadian car production through the 1964 model year. Studebaker had been the largest employer in St. Joseph County; close to a quarter of South Bend's workforce was Black, and the closure fell on those neighborhoods with the rest.

The city's first answer: Two days after the announcement, 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 its sentence: "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." Unemployment rose from 2.1 percent in November 1963 to 9 percent in early 1964 — and, in the Tribune's reporting of the figures, was back to 2.6 percent by September 1965 as other employers absorbed the workforce. The longer civic reckoning belongs to the Story of South Bend section and government legs of this history; what belongs here is the archivist's measure of the wound: "The healing took decades."

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune (2026), from its reporting of December 1963 and after — the board's vote of 9 December, Colwell's story and the front-page headlines, Guthrie's $40 million statement of 10 December, the last car completed at Hamilton (carried in the Hamilton entry), Gilbert's words of 11 December, and the unemployment figures of November 1963 (2.1 percent), early 1964 (9 percent), and September 1965 (2.6 percent); Beckman: "The healing took decades."
2. Standard encyclopedia history of Studebaker — Egbert's ouster and Burlingame's succession, the announcement of 9 December 1963, the last Larks and Hawks of 20 December and the last Avanti of 26 December, the military-truck and Zip Van continuation into early 1964, the foundry's operation to May 1964, and the plant's standing as St. Joseph County's largest employer.
3. "After the Last Shift — South Bend" (2026), an account of the works' remains — the red hardtop off the main line on Friday, 20 December 1963.