The day the line stopped

South Bend, Ind. On Monday, 9 December 1963, the news came out of New York. Studebaker would stop building cars in the United States. “The end of an era came suddenly for 6,000 Studebaker Corp. employes yesterday,” the Associated Press wrote from South Bend the next day; the announcement “came as a shock.”

“The end of an era came suddenly for 6,000 Studebaker Corp. employes yesterday”

Eleven days later the last Larks and Hawks rolled out of the South Bend plant. A company that had begun with two forges in 1852 was gone from the city it had made. And because thousands of its workers lost the pensions they had been promised, the closing reached far beyond South Bend, all the way to a law that now protects the retirement of tens of millions of Americans. This is the third and last part of our series.

First by far with a postwar car

DocumentedStudebaker came out of the war fast. It had retained the industrial designer Raymond Loewy and his firm as consultants since 1936, and its new 1947 models were among the first truly new postwar cars; the company advertised itself as “first by far with a postwar car.” The 1947 Starlight coupe, with its wraparound rear window, was styled in Loewy’s studio by Virgil Exner, with Robert Bourke also credited.

DocumentedThe 1950 cars had the famous “bullet nose.” The 1953 Starliner hardtop and Starlight coupe, long and low, were publicly credited to Loewy but were, by Bourke’s own account, largely Bourke’s work. Collectors and designers still admire them.

Packard and the long decline

DocumentedBeauty did not pay the bills. In 1954 Packard of Detroit bought Studebaker, and on 1 October the two became the Studebaker-Packard Corporation under James J. Nance. It did not save either name. The last Packard came off the line on 25 July 1958, and that September the company ended the pension plan for its Packard workers; retirees got 85 percent of their benefits.

DocumentedThe compact Lark of 1959 sold more than 130,000 in its first year and bought time. In February 1961 Sherwood Egbert became president, and in 1962 the company took back the name Studebaker Corporation.

The Avanti

DocumentedEgbert’s great throw of the dice was a sports car. Loewy’s team, Tom Kellogg, Bob Andrews and John Ebstein, designed it on a forty-day schedule, and it was unveiled on 26 April 1962 at the New York International Automobile Show. The Avanti had no grille, a fibreglass body and a shape unlike anything else on the road. About 1,200 were made in 1962 and fewer than 4,600 in 1963. The last South Bend Avanti is said to be car R-5643: the collectors’ registry gives its final assembly as 31 December 1963 and reports a note in the trunk wishing a happy new year; we have not seen the factory’s production order.

DocumentedThe Avanti outlived the company. In 1965 two South Bend dealers, Nate Altman and Leo Newman, began building it again as the Avanti II in part of the old plant.

9 December 1963

DocumentedThe decision came from the board in New York. On 9 December the Dow Jones news service reported that Studebaker would “quit auto production in the United States but continue to make cars in Canada,” and that the closing would “cut off employment for about 6,000 persons, including 5,000 hourly workers.” The chairman, Randolph H. Guthrie, confirmed that an announcement was coming; the formal press conference was set for the next day in New York.

DocumentedSouth Bend learned it from the radio and the papers. The last Larks and Hawks were built on 20 December 1963. Production went on for a little over two years at the company’s plant in Hamilton, Ontario, and ended there on 17 March 1966. The last Studebaker built, a Cruiser sedan, is in the museum in South Bend.

DocumentedWashington tried to soften the blow. By the end of December, the Evening Star wrote, President Johnson “has tried hard to soften the impact of the Studebaker shutdown in South Bend”: the Labor Department offered retraining, the Commerce Department tried to bring in new industry, surplus food was sent, and an Army truck program was pushed for the empty plant.

The pensions

DocumentedThe worst of it was the pensions. When the plant closed, Studebaker ended its pension plan for its South Bend workers, and the plan did not have the money to pay what it had promised. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal agency that now insures such plans, says that “more than 8,500 auto workers” at the South Bend plant “lost some or all of their promised pension plan benefits.”

DocumentedThe legal historian James A. Wooten, in the fullest study of the case, explains how the loss fell. Retirees and workers aged sixty and over received their full pensions. Of the rest, “some received a lump-sum payment worth a fraction of the pension they expected; others got nothing at all.” A widely repeated breakdown gives 3,600 who were paid in full, 4,000 who received lump sums worth about 15 percent of their pensions, and 2,900 who received nothing; its total does not match the federal figure. The Labor Department’s own history counts 3,600 paid in full and about 7,000 who got no more than 15 percent, nearly 3,000 of them nothing. The earliest total we have found is from 1968, when the American Enterprise Institute wrote of the “pension rights of approximately 10,500 Studebaker retirees and employees”; a Brookings Institution study of 1977 described the older workers getting their full pensions and the younger “less than 15 percent” of their partially vested rights.

DocumentedNew findingThe breakdown goes back at least to a Senate hearing held in South Bend on 4 June 1971. Senator Hartke said there that “the failure of 2,900 Studebaker workers to receive any pension payment whatsoever is wrong,” and that “more than 4,000 other Studebaker employees between the ages of 40 and 59 received only 15 percent of the pensions due them.” A telegram from the UAW’s president, Leonard Woodcock, gave the union’s count: “Of 11,000 active workers at Studebaker 2900 lost all pension entitlements,” and 4,500, of average age 52 and average service 23 years, “lost all but 15% of their pension entitlements.” Former Studebaker workers testified the same day to what the closing had cost them.

DocumentedThe Studebaker workers became the case that reformers pointed to for a decade. Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana introduced a bill to reinsure private pensions in August 1964. A Senate staffer, Wooten records, called Studebaker “the most glorious story of failure in the business.” On Labor Day, 2 September 1974, President Gerald Ford signed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which set standards for private pension plans and created the agency that insures them.

“the failure of 2,900 Studebaker workers to receive any pension payment whatsoever is wrong”

ReadingIt is hard to think of another factory closing that changed so many lives so far away. The men who lost their pensions when Studebaker left South Bend got little or nothing back from the law their story helped to pass. But every American with a private pension plan has, in a sense, a little of South Bend in it.

What remains

DocumentedThe company had kept a museum of its own since at least the 1920s, with the presidential carriages, the covered wagon John Studebaker built in 1830 and the buggy H. & C. Studebaker made in 1857. When the company left South Bend it gave its historic collection to the city: in 1966, by the tourism bureau’s account, thirty-three vehicles. The Studebaker National Museum opened its present building at 201 South Chapin Street in November 2005, beside The History Museum.

DocumentedThe works themselves are mostly gone, but not all. Building 84, the six-storey concrete assembly building of 1923 designed by Albert Kahn, still stands at the heart of the Renaissance District, a redevelopment of the old works south of downtown, and the former Studebaker administration building on South Main Street is being stabilized for reuse.

DocumentedWest of the city, at Bendix Woods County Park near New Carlisle, the company in 1938 planted about eight thousand pine trees to spell STUDEBAKER, big enough to read from the air. The Studebaker Clubhouse and Tree Sign were listed on the National Register on 18 September 1985. An ice storm damaged the sign in December 2004, and it was replanted in 2015.

DocumentedIn June 2025 the Indiana Historical Bureau and the William G. Pomeroy Foundation dedicated a state historical marker, “The Studebaker Corporation,” at 1945 South Lafayette Boulevard. Tippecanoe Place, Clem’s house on West Washington Street, is a National Historic Landmark; the restaurant that occupied it closed on 5 January 2026, and its operator said he hoped “somebody that has more resources can continue the tradition.”

DocumentedThe family is in South Bend’s cemeteries. Clem was laid in the City Cemetery and later moved to Riverview Cemetery: in a mausoleum built for him in 1896, by the cemetery’s National Register nomination (other accounts say the Studebaker-Milburn mausoleum of 1884). New findingJ. M. went to the City Cemetery too: on 20 March 1917, the News-Times reported, his funeral cortege “passed along Jefferson blvd. to the city cemetery where the body was placed in the family mausoleum.” The museum now places him at Riverview, where the family later had a mausoleum of its own. New findingThe move was planned in November 1922, when his executors let a contract for a Tudor Gothic chapel at Riverview, to cost $75,000 to $100,000, whose marble sarcophagus would “hold the remains of the late J. M. and Mrs. Studebaker, now placed in the Studebaker mausoleum in City cemetery.” The rest of the family followed later: the nomination says the Studebakers in the 1884 mausoleum were moved to Riverview in 1932, and the remains in Clem’s mausoleum in 1936. The family is the largest in the City Cemetery, with more than fifty burials. The family’s mausoleums at the City Cemetery were still in use in January 1931, when Clem’s daughter Mrs. Carlisle was buried “in the Studebaker mausoleum at the City cemetery.” When J. M. himself was moved we have not found. The City Cemetery, founded in 1831, was listed on the National Register in 2018.

Story or record? Play along

Now that you have read the record, try these six. For each claim, make your call: true, false, or no record either way. Then see what the record says.

Questions we answered

A timeline

• 1936 Raymond Loewy’s firm retained as design consultants
• 1938 The tree sign planted at the proving ground
• 1947 The Starlight coupe: “first by far with a postwar car”
• 1953 The Starliner hardtop
• 1954 Studebaker-Packard Corporation formed, 1 October
• 1958 Last Packard built, 25 July
• 1962 The Avanti unveiled, 26 April
• 1963 South Bend closing announced, 9 December; last Larks and Hawks, 20 December
• 1964 Senator Hartke’s pension reinsurance bill
• 1966 Last Studebaker built at Hamilton, Ontario, 17 March; the collection given to the city
• 1971 Senate hearing in South Bend on the lost pensions, 4 June
• 1974 ERISA signed, 2 September
• 31 years later
• 2005 The Studebaker National Museum opens its new building
• 20 years later
• 2025 State historical marker dedicated

Test yourself

If you go

DocumentedStart at the Studebaker National Museum, 201 South Chapin Street, which shares an entrance with The History Museum. Drive past Building 84 on the old works site, and follow the Studebaker-Bendix Heritage Trail west to Bendix Woods County Park, where the trees still spell the name.