South Bend, Indiana · 20th century
1930s
64 dated events in 1930s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
20th century 64 dated mentions
1930s
- 1930The Russian order of 1930
In August 1930 a Soviet delegation was shown the new Oliver 28-44 tractor at Charles City — a prototype finished, after its bearings burned out in Sunday testing, in an all-night rebuild hours before the delegation arrived.
- 1930The Studebaker test drivers: Johnson and McDonald at Indianapolis
His one AAA Championship start was the 1930 Indianapolis 500, in a Studebaker special: he started 13th and finished 18th, out after 112 laps with a fuel tank leak.
- 1930Booster cartography: the map as advertisement
The exemplar in the State Library's list is the South Bend Association of Commerce's All Roads Lead to South Bend (1930) — the title is the whole argument, the city drawn as the hub of a wheel of highways at the moment the automobile road net was new, every spoke running to South Bend.
- 1930The Hoffman Hotel
Lead: The Hoffman Hotel, at 120 West LaSalle Avenue just west of the LaSalle, was built in 1930 at a cost of five hundred thousand dollars: twelve stories of red brick with limestone trim and terra-cotta mosaic panels, by Willard M. Ellwood…
- 1930–1935Receivership: March 1933 to March 1935
Erskine kept faith that prosperity was returning and held the dividend: huge dividends were declared in 1930 and 1931 while the market collapsed, draining the company's cash — "ultimately they were broke by 1933," in museum archivist Beckman's summary.
- 1930–2024Clay High School
The school's standard reference record gives "established 1930" and a dedication in 1930; the South Bend Tribune's photo archives date the old Washington-Clay High School building to 1931–1932; the Adams student newspaper, in its history of the corporation's high schools, gives 1939.
- 1931The Rockne: built in both of the company's cities
The make, apart from the memorial: The Rockne's story — the coach's appointment to Studebaker's sales-promotion work, his death in the Kansas air crash of 31 March 1931, the first production car presented to his widow, President Erskine's words at the unveiling — is the Studebaker section's, and stands there whole.
- 1931Edison Park and Coquillard Woods
The northwest's youngest neighborhood was cornfields with a pump house: in 1931 the city built a pumping station for Coquillard Woods — a round brick building in the Italian style with a green tile roof, "the round house" of later neighborhood memory…
- 1931The city stops for Rockne's funeral, 1931
The event: Knute Rockne was killed on March 31, 1931, in the crash of TWA Flight 599 at Bazaar, Kansas; the man and his career are People's.
- 1931Junior Walker: formed in South Bend
He was born Autry DeWalt Mixon Jr. on June 14, 1931, in Blytheville, Arkansas — the year is stated here because Motown's publicity long planted 1942, a fabrication the Famous People record corrects from the documents — and he grew up in South Bend.
- 1931The Spirit of Notre Dame (1931) — set here, shot at Universal City
The various elements of the feature had been incorporated into a contract, and the contract was to be signed on a certain day; in order to keep that engagement, Rockne took off on the airplane trip that killed him, over Kansas, on 31 March 1931.
- 1931–1934The Depression test — South Bend's banks, 1931 to 1934
1931, the solvent liquidation and the June closings: The sorting began in order: on 31 January 1931 the South Bend State Bank liquidated voluntarily while solvent, dividing its business between the First National and the Union Trust.
- 1931–1970Depression, war, and the Chesapeake & Ohio years
The South Shore outlived every other interurban in the country by being useful to freight shippers and indispensable to war workers: The Insull empire's collapse took the railroad into bankruptcy on 30 September 1933, but the South Bend end of the line got a Depression-era investment that shaped its freight century…
- 1931–1995Jr. Walker: the sound the west side sent to Motown
Junior Walker (1931–1995): born Autry DeWalt Mixon Jr. on 14 June 1931 at Blytheville, Arkansas, and raised in South Bend, where his mother had come seeking work — the tie is upbringing, printed at that strength.
- 1931–1995Junior Walker — the Motown saxophonist who grew up here
The tie, exactly: Walker was born Autry DeWalt Mixon Jr. on June 14, 1931, in Blytheville, Arkansas — and grew up in South Bend.
- 1931–2024Rockne's grave — the famous grave that moved
The place that was: For ninety-three years the most visited grave in South Bend stood in Highland Cemetery, on Portage Avenue in the city: Knute Rockne's, where six of his own players carried him in April 1931.
- 1931–2024The famous grave that moved
The move: For ninety-three years the most visited grave in South Bend stood in Highland Cemetery, on Portage Avenue in the city: Knute Rockne's, where six of his own players carried him in April 1931.
- 1931–todayThe First Bank and Trust Company — 1st Source Bank, and the 1863 question
The descent is real, and documented at every link: the First National Bank of South Bend was organized on 5 September 1863, chartered on 13 November 1863 as OCC Charter No. 126, and opened on 30 November 1863…
- 1931–todayTeachers Credit Union — Everwise: ten dollars in a tin cash box
Harold H. Blanchard, a mathematics teacher at South Bend Central High School, formed a committee in February 1931 to organize a credit union for the city's teachers; an Indiana state charter was granted in July 1931; the South Bend Teachers Federation Credit Union was formed by September; and it opened for business on 13 October 1931.
- 1932One more summer — the Twins of 1932
The last early club: Professional baseball returned once more before the war: the South Bend Twins played a single season in the Class B Central League in 1932, at Springbrook Park.
- 1932Sinai Synagogue: From Orthodox Founding to Conservative Congregation
Founding: Sinai Synagogue was established in June 1932 as an Orthodox congregation.
- 1932The arts as corporations: the Symphony association, the Civic Theatre, the Fischoff
The Symphony's association: The South Bend Symphony Orchestra exists in law as the South Bend Symphony Orchestra Association Inc. Its own history tells the founding: after Frederic Ingersoll's earlier orchestra dissolved in the Depression, the singer and conductor Edwyn H. Hames formed the South Bend Symphony in 1932…
- 1932The South Bend Symphony: the Hames founding
Twenty-five cents a week: The South Bend Symphony Orchestra was formed in 1932 by Edwyn H. Hames, an Australian violinist teaching in the city, out of his own string students assisted by professional players.
- 1933The name line: six names over one field
The airport has been renamed five times, and each name dates: It opened in 1933 as Bendix Municipal Airport , and flew as Bendix Field through the county purchase into the county era, when it became the St. Joseph County Airport…
- 1933Christ the King Parish
Founding: Christ the King was founded in 1933 as an offshoot of Sacred Heart Parish at Notre Dame. Its first pastor was Holy Cross Father Clement Funke.
- 1933Paul G. Hoffman and Harold S. Vance — the receivers who handed back a company
As receivers they persuaded the court that the creditors were best served by keeping the company in production: Pierce-Arrow was sold back to Buffalo interests in August 1933, the model line was scaled down, costs were cut through the works, and by December 1933 the company was back in profit, with $5.75 million of…
- 1933–1934The Dillinger test · the gang's course around this ground, and the one job in it
The question: the Dillinger gang worked northern Indiana and the Chicago country through 1933 and 1934, and local retelling in every city on its roads has since placed the gang inside that city's banks.
- 1933–2017Sue Kidd: From a Boys' Team in Arkansas to the Staff Ace
Glenna Sue Kidd was born September 2, 1933, in Choctaw, Arkansas, and was pitching for the Clinton High School boys' team at fifteen when the Springfield Sallies' touring side signed her after a Little Rock tryout in June 1949.
- 1934One car, built in secret: the Bendix SWC of 1934
The project: In 1934 the Bendix Corporation built exactly one complete automobile: a hand-built prototype sedan, built under the dummy company name "Steel Wheel Corporation" — the SWC — to hide the project from Bendix's own customers, General Motors among them, which held roughly a quarter of Bendix's stock.
- 1934The small fields around the county
Mishawaka Airport opened on Labor Day 1934 at Dragoon Trail and Elm Road — an air parade and parachute jumps for the dedication, a federal listing in January 1935 of 3,960 by 1,320 feet of sod — and its last press references come in May 1948, when a storm damaged its hangar…
- 1934Pointed To: The Merchants National Bank Robbery
On June 30, 1934, the gang robbed the Merchants National Bank in South Bend, and Patrolman Howard Wagner was killed.
- 1934The Merchants National Bank · the last Dillinger robbery
What happened in it on the last Saturday of June 1934 is told here. The robbery: it was late Saturday morning, about 11:30, the busiest hour of the downtown week.
- 1934The answer in steel · the South Bend "Dillinger Car"
The Studebaker Company custom-designed a 1934 President sedan for the department — the car the city called the Dillinger Car — with a powerful motor, a gun porthole in the windshield, and armored baffles to shield the radiator and the tires.
- 1934Patrolman Howard Wagner · the Dillinger gang's last bank robbery
On 30 June 1934 four members of the Dillinger gang robbed the Merchants National Bank in downtown South Bend, taking $29,890.
- 1934–1940The end of the streetcars: conversion, 1934–1940
The course of the conversion: Bus conversion began in 1934 — the year the interurban lines were abandoned, which is the Trains section's date of 1 June 1934 — and it proceeded line by line for six years.
- 1934–1953The Closed High Schools — Central Catholic, South Bend Catholic, and the 1953 Consolidation
Central Catholic: The Brothers of Holy Cross opened Central Catholic High School in September 1934 on the second floor of St. Matthew School, with eighteen students and two brothers.
- 1934–1986Lloyd Haynes — Pete Dixon of Room 222
Reference works split on his birth date: October 19, 1934 (the date the Tribune obituary and the standard references give) against September 19, 1934 (several database listings).
- 1934–2008Sydney Pollack — the director, raised here
The tie, exactly: Pollack was not born in South Bend, and this section prints the correction plainly because aggregator biographies get it wrong: he was born on July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Indiana.
- 1934–2025The story as it grew · the South Bend Dillinger lore, tested
Pierpont, Makley and Russell Clark had been convicted in Ohio in March 1934 of the murder of Sheriff Jess Sarber of Lima and were in Ohio custody on June 30, 1934, Pierpont and Makley under sentence of death; Makley was shot dead in the pair's escape attempt that September, and Pierpont was executed on October 17, 1934.
- 1934–2025The shape of the record · statute, scale, and the one death
The statute: bank robbery became a federal crime in May 1934, weeks before the Merchants National was robbed — the statute that stands today at 18 U.S.C. § 2113 was the Dillinger era's own legislation.
- 1935–1943The federal test: the Farm Security Administration did not photograph this city
The companion volume, John A. Reid, ed., Back Home Again: Indiana in the Farm Security Administration Photographs, 1935–1943 (Indiana University Press, 1987), carries the same geography.
- 1935–1998Judge Grant and the federal bench
His first public office was the county's: deputy prosecuting attorney of St. Joseph County, 1935–1936 — the prosecutor's desk of the 1930s, at the deputy level the record preserves.
- 1936The county buys the field, 1936–1938
The Depression made the airport public: In July 1936 St. Joseph County voted to buy Bendix Field from the Bendix interests on a $210,000 bond issue, and the purchase was completed in 1937, making Bendix Field the first publicly owned airport in the area.
- 1936Amelia Earhart, 1936: the famous landing the record supports
The airport authority's own history records the visit: "Amelia Earhart in 1936 when she landed her Lockheed Electra aircraft at Bendix field" — the sentence stands on the St. Joseph County Airport Authority's history page, and this record prints it as the authority's statement.
- 1936The Bendix sit-down · nine days, or six, that started an era
On the morning of 17 November 1936, the sit-down strike came to the automobile industry in South Bend: Workers in several departments of the Bendix Products plant stopped work and stayed at their machines.
- 1936Drewry's: the Canadian century of the Muessel ground, 1936–1972
In 1936 it decided to brew in the United States itself, and the ground it bought was Christopher Muessel's.
- 1936–1940The WPA Cat House
The zoo's earlier published history dates the building to 1936 and says of it: "This building still stands today and is known as the WPA building and currently houses one species of leopard."
- 1936–1950Defense housing · the city builds for war workers, separately
Even wartime emergency housing was sited to keep the map intact: A 1936 WPA property survey , sponsored by the City Plan Commission, documented South Bend's need for low-income housing…
- 1936–1956The Loewy years: the Champion, the coming-or-going coupe, and the Bourke coupes
In 1936 the company first retained Raymond Loewy and Associates, with Helen Dryden, as design consultants — Loewy on exteriors, Dryden on interiors — and the first Loewy-credited Studebakers appeared for 1938.
- 1936–1956The automatic washing machine — Bendix Home Appliances
In 1936 the corporation licensed its name — for a 25 percent stake — to Bendix Home Appliances, another South Bend company, founded by Judson S. Sayre; the Powerhouse Museum's collection record gives the founder's first name as Jason, and the two forms stand as their sources give them.
- 1936–2016The Local 9 generation: the thousand who sat down
The sit-downers of Bendix, November 1936: this entry belongs to a body of people the record mostly holds collectively, and it prints them at that size honestly.
- 1937St. Therese, Little Flower Parish
The seminarians’ discovery: In 1937 two seminarians from Moreau Seminary, Patrick Peyton and Jack Haley, chasing the seminary’s runaway horse, found it grazing in the Morningside Addition — “Dog Patch,” as the settlement was unkindly called…
- 1937Camp Millhouse
Founding and course: Camp Millhouse began in 1937 as a camp for children with polio — the camp's own account, carried in its executive director's telling and its published histories.
- 1937The name written for airplanes
On the proving ground Studebaker opened in 1926 near New Carlisle — the first controlled outdoor proving ground built by an American automobile manufacturer, some 840 acres with a three-mile oval…
- 1937–1971The Bendix name in other cities — radios, instruments, computers
The Bendix Radio Division was formed in 1937 and set up in Baltimore, Maryland, first inside a General Motors plant at 920 East Fort Avenue and, four years later, in a larger plant at Towson…
- 1937–1999The Tribune Photographs Collection: the city's picture archive
The finding aid of the South Bend Tribune Photographs Collection, held by the St. Joseph County Public Library's Local & Family History department, measures the surviving archive at twenty-one cabinets and ninety-four boxes of negatives and transparencies, dated 1937–1999 with the bulk from 1950–1999…
- 1937–todayBorn here, famous elsewhere: the screen
Chad Everett (1937–2012): born Raymon Lee Cramton in South Bend on 11 June 1937 and raised in Dearborn, Michigan — the tie is birth, and it is printed at that strength.
- 1938Goodwill Industries of Michiana
Founding and present state: Goodwill Industries of Michiana's federal record — the Internal Revenue Service's ruling on its exemption — is dated July 1938, and that is the founding anchor this account prints.
- 1938–1991John Bellairs — the Gothic children's novelist Notre Dame formed
John Bellairs was born in Marshall, Michigan, on 17 January 1938.
- 1938–todayWashington High School
Founded: Washington High School was established in 1938 on the city's west side, its program opened in the old Washington School building at 1534 West Sample Street, at Humphrey's Court.
- 1939Mike Salay: South Bend's postwar 500 starter
From South Bend: Mike Salay — born Michael Leo Szalai on 10 June 1909 in South Bend, died here 14 November 1973 — was racing big cars before the war: at the Belleville, Kansas, fair races of 1939 he is listed from South Bend, Indiana, winning a match race on 31 August 1939, and in 1940 he won a feature there in Jimmy…
- 1939–1941The magazine visitors: Hansel Mieth's census and George Strock's Bendix women
In August 1939 Hansel Mieth — the German-born photographer who, with Otto Hagel, had made the defining documentary work of California's migrant and labor world…
- 1939–1972Firsts in public life · the legislature, the council chamber, the uniform, the classroom
J. Chester Allen's House service (1939–43) and his later standing as the council's first Black member (1960–63) and the county bar's first Black president (1969–70) are told in the Allens entry; Elizabeth Fletcher Allen's firsts…
- 1939–2026Gene's Camera: the supply trade's own 87 years
Gene's Camera, at 513 Lincoln Way West, began in 1939 as the Picture Equipment Company; later that same year Eugene Mutzl bought it and renamed it Gene's Photo Shop, and he kept it for more than forty years.