Nine days in December: Studebaker closes

9 — 20 DECEMBER 1963

Every South Bend history turns on eleven days in December 1963: The Studebaker that entered the 1960s was a diversified corporation whose car division had been losing its fight for a decade — through the 1954 merger with Packard and a market that no longer had room for an independent in South Bend. The compact Lark of 1959 had bought the company time — the marque histories credit it with saving Studebaker once — but the reprieve ran out with the 1964 models, whose poor sales brought the ouster of the company's president, Sherwood Egbert, and a board resolved to stop the losses where they stood. On Monday, December 9, 1963, the company announced it would close its South Bend automobile plant. The South Bend Tribune broke the closure across its front page the day the announcement came; in Washington, President Johnson ordered a federal committee under his secretaries of labor and commerce to answer for the workers. Some 7,000 people still worked at the plant — down from close to 24,000 in 1950 — and the blow fell unevenly: the workforce was nearly a quarter African-American, and Black South Bend, a generation into factory wages, took the closing hardest. The pension plan the company terminated came up, by the documented accounts, some $14 million short, and most workers received a fraction of what they had been promised; the pension collapse at Studebaker became a national byword and part of the case that eventually produced federal pension insurance.

Production wound down with a dignity the record kept. The last car off the main South Bend line, on Friday, December 20, 1963, was a Bordeaux Red 1964 Lark Daytona two-door hardtop — a car the Studebaker National Museum holds today. The final Avantis followed on December 26. The engine foundry stayed open into 1964 to supply the Canadian plant at Hamilton, Ontario, which had built Studebakers since 1948 and now carried the name alone; the last Studebaker of all, a turquoise 1966 Cruiser, was built at Hamilton on March 16, 1966 — some accounts give March 17 — and the automobile story the blacksmith shop began in 1852 ended, 114 years on, in another country. In February 1964 Kaiser-Jeep bought the Chippewa Avenue plant together with Studebaker's General Products Division — the military truck contracts and the works that filled them — and the vehicle work Studebaker had done since the Civil War passed to successors: through Kaiser-Jeep and American Motors to AM General, created from that same division in 1971, which keeps its headquarters in South Bend today while its Humvee plant stands in Mishawaka, on that city's ground and in that city's record. What Studebaker left the city, beyond the empty plant, was its memory: in 1966 the company donated its vehicle collection and its archives to South Bend, the seed of the national museum that tells the story now.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune — the closure story across the front page of December 9, 1963; President Johnson's federal committee; the 1964 sale of the military truck business and the Chippewa plant to Kaiser-Jeep.
2. City of South Bend reference history — the announcement of December 9, 1963, the workforce of some 7,000, the nearly one-quarter African-American workforce and the closing's unequal weight, and the 1966 gift of the company collection and archives to the city.
3. Studebaker and Lark references (Wikipedia, from the marque literature) — the last South Bend car of December 20, 1963, a Bordeaux Red 1964 Lark Daytona hardtop; the final Avantis of December 26; the foundry's continuation into 1964; Hamilton's last Studebaker dated March 16, 1966, some sources giving March 17.
4. Studebaker pension accounts — the terminated plan's shortfall of about $14 million and the fractional payments to most workers.
5. studebaker section, this record — the closing in full.