December Twentieth, Nineteen Sixty-Three

The announcement came on a Friday in December. On December twentieth, nineteen sixty-three, the Studebaker Corporation ended automobile production at its South Bend plant. Permanently. The last Larks and Hawks were assembled that day.

South Bend had built itself around Studebaker for more than a century. The company was the largest private employer in Saint Joseph County. Estimates of peak employment run as high as twenty-three thousand workers in the twenties, with many thousands more in the supply chain and the businesses that depended on plant wages. The city's neighborhoods, its churches, its taverns and corner stores had been organized around the rhythms of factory shifts for three generations.

What followed was what urban economists would later classify as deindustrialization: the systematic dismantling of a manufacturing economy without a ready replacement. The population of South Bend, which had grown steadily for over a century, began falling. Over the following decades, the city lost nearly thirty thousand residents. Vacant lots appeared where supplier businesses had operated. The tax base shrank.

The Studebaker facilities themselves sat largely empty. The factory complex, enormous by any measure, was too expensive to demolish, too large to easily repurpose. It decayed for decades, one of the most visible monuments to industrial collapse in the Midwest.

Studebaker's closure came less than a month after the assassination of President Kennedy, which had dominated the national news for weeks.

By nineteen sixty-three, twenty-three thousand workers had become eleven thousand. By the end, longtime employees who had thought their jobs were secure found them gone.