100 Years of the Engman Public Natatorium

On June 29, 1922, several hundred people attended a special, two-hour evening opening of the new Engman Public Natatorium. By September, South Bend’s Parks Board estimated almost 10,000 people took advantage of the brand-new facility.

It is unclear exactly when the white people in charge of the Natatorium first denied entry to African American people—but they did. And as a taxpayer funded, supposedly “public” facility, it became a focus of local civil rights action by a group of doctors, lawyer, politicians, and other Black professionals pushing against an entrenched system of discrimination.

By 1978, the Natatorium was over fifty years old, and it was falling apart. Officials started asking whether it was time to shut it down.

Paul McMinn was just out of college then. Bob Goodrich offered him a job to run the Natatorium. Neither of them knew it would be the Nat’s last open season.

In 2018, I sat down with Paul and Bob, and also Bob Heiderman who taught classes at the Natatorium and other pools in South Bend.

As we’re now over a century since the Natatorium first opened, I thought it was fitting to hear Paul and the two Bob’s talk about the last days of the Engman Public Natatorium.

This episode was produced by Donald Brittain from the Ernestine M. Raclin School of the Arts at IU South Bend, and by George Garner from the Civil Rights Heritage Center.

Full transcript of this episode available here.

Want to learn more about South Bend’s history? View the photographs and documents that helped create it. Visit Michiana Memory at http://michianamemory.sjcpl.org/.

Title music, “History Explains Itself,” from Josh Spacek. Visit his page on the Free Music Archive, http://www.freemusicarchive.org/.