Allen County, Indiana · 20th century
1930s
49 dated events in 1930s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
20th century 49 dated mentions
1930s
- 1930The Broadway State Bank robbery · and the wrong "Machine Gun" Kelly
On August 20, 1930, the Broadway State Bank at Broadway and Taylor streets was robbed of $5,912.
Fort Wayne
- 1930Essex Wire Corporation — Fort Wayne plant (later Essex Group / Essex International / Superior Essex)
Founded (company): 1930, Detroit, Michigan.
Fort Wayne
- 1930Magnavox — the consumer decades
The History Center's account dates the move to 1930; Indianapolis Monthly 's history says the company arrived in 1931; the published history of Magnavox's government division dates the relocation to 1932, made, its review records, to be closer to the city's copper mills — the magnet-wire trade of the entry above was part of the draw.
Fort Wayne
- 1930The airmail contract and the first airlines, 1930–1947
The improvements at the north field — paved runways, the great heated Hangar 2 — finally attracted a commercial airmail carrier to Fort Wayne in December 1930, and the field then served for more than thirty years as a stop and waypoint on the transcontinental airmail route, as the National Airmail Museum's account states it.
Fort Wayne
- 1930The armories · Clinton Street to Cook Road
The armory the city eventually got stood elsewhere: the National Guard Armory at 330 South Clinton Street, completed in 1930, which served for sixty-seven years as drill hall, and — because it was one of the largest halls in the city — as a concert and public-events venue as well.
Fort Wayne
- 1930Fort Wayne Speedway: the big track
The fastest bowl in Indiana, and the most dangerous: On farmland along dirt California Road, on the county fairgrounds north of where Glenbrook Square stands today on Coliseum Boulevard, the builder Frank Funk — who also built the Winchester and Dayton speedways and was known for fast tracks…
Fort Wayne
- 1930The Paramount Theatre: the last downtown palace built
The News-Sentinel marked its arrival with a special section when it opened on October 3, 1930 — the public opening followed on October 4 — with Buddy Rogers in Follow Thru as the first attraction.
Fort Wayne
- 1930The Maumee Theatre: the east side's picture house
A short, ordinary, complete record: The Maumee Theatre at 1121 Maumee Avenue opened in 1930 with 590 seats and was operated by Premiere Theatres.
Fort Wayne
- 1930–1964Classrooms for the factory city
Indiana Technical College — today's Indiana Tech — was founded in 1930 by John A. Kalbfleisch to train engineers for the plants.
Fort Wayne
- 1930–2024The bank buildings
The tower: The Lincoln Bank Tower at 116 East Berry Street, opened 16 November 1930 — twenty-two stories, 312 feet, $1.3 million, the tallest building in Indiana until 1962…
Fort Wayne
- 1930–todayIndiana Tech
Founded: June 1930, by John A. Kalbfleisch — an educator at International Business College from 1906 to 1927 and its president in his last two years there.
Fort Wayne
- 1931The price: the speedway's dead
In May 1931 Raymond Meyers, 31, of Indianapolis, was killed during time trials when his machine hurtled over the track's 28-foot embankment.
Fort Wayne
- 1931–2008The Lincoln Museum — the museum Fort Wayne lost
In February 1931 the foundation dedicated the Lincoln Museum and Library.
Fort Wayne
- 1931–2010Elmhurst High School
Crumbling mortar paused construction, and Elmhurst's students attended its twin school, Hillcrest, until Elmhurst opened for the 1931 school year.
Fort Wayne
- 1932The accident record
Two earlier and later entries bracket it in the archives: on 21 April 1932 a Stearman C-3MB mail plane on the South Bend–Fort Wayne run stalled on final approach at 300 feet and crashed short of the runway, killing its pilot — the airmail era's local price…
Fort Wayne
- 1932Kept in the cases: the fashion record in Fort Wayne's collections
The History Center holds the trade's advertising made solid: a painted Wayne Knit display statue of 1932, made to stand in stores and sell stockings, and a Wayne Knitting Mills nylon stocking of 1940, the new fiber in its first year.
Fort Wayne
- 1933Repeal and the neighborhood tavern
The first pour, claimed twice: National repeal came on December 5, 1933, and Fort Wayne's legal trade restarted at once.
Fort Wayne
- 1933The license ledger, in brief
The two "first license" claims of 1933 — the State Bar's first beer and Belmont's Flagship as the first store licensed after Repeal — are told in the tavern entry.
Fort Wayne
- 1933The long quiet: 1933–2016
Repeal without makers: When national repeal came on December 5, 1933, Fort Wayne's breweries resumed within the year — Centlivre and Berghoff are the Business section's story, told there.
Fort Wayne
- 1933–1985The mid-century order
The system restated: The banks that emerged from 1933 — the new Fort Wayne National Bank at 110 West Berry, the Lincoln National Bank and Trust in its 1930 tower, the Peoples Trust and the Dime…
Fort Wayne
- 1933–2017Ian M. Rolland — Lincoln's hometown chief
Born in Fort Wayne on 3 June 1933, he graduated from North Side High School in 1951, studied at DePauw and the University of Michigan, and began at Lincoln National Life in 1956.
Fort Wayne
- 1933–todayRea Magnet Wire Company
Founded: 1933, Fort Wayne. Rea's own history timeline, the News-Sentinel , the Copper Development Association and the company's reference summary all agree: Victor Rea formed Rea Magnet Wire in 1933.
Fort Wayne
- 1933–todayThe Black press · papers of record for a community the dailies missed
The Indianapolis Recorder , Indiana's great Black weekly, carried Fort Wayne's news through the 1930s and 1940s — Peggy Seigel's history of employment discrimination in this city is sourced in large part from its columns: the segregated Labor Day of 1933, the Bethune visit of 1940, the Fort Wayne NAACP's doings.
Fort Wayne
- 1934Charles H. Seyfert — the chip maker
Charles H. Seyfert cooked his first batch of potato chips on 20 August 1934 at 450 East Wallace Street in Fort Wayne — the founding of Seyfert's, the chip company the city snacked on for the rest of the century.
Fort Wayne
- 1934Fort Wayne Youtheatre
Founding: In 1934 Dr. Clive McAllister, president of the Old Fort Players, appointed a committee to create a children's theatre branch; the company's own education guides tell it that way, while the mission statement carried by Charity Navigator names the founders as Mrs. Chan Ray and Mrs. Lester Jacobs.
Fort Wayne
- 1934Fort Wayne Youtheatre: forty students, one dollar, seventy-five actors
The founding, two ways: The Youtheatre's house history gives its 1934 founding to a committee: Dr. Clive McAllister, president of the Old Fort Players (now the Civic Theatre), appointed one to create a junior or children's theatre branch, on the philosophy that dramatic instruction would develop children's poise…
Fort Wayne
- 1934–2018Seyfert's (Seyfert Foods)
Founded: Charles H. Seyfert cooked his first batch of potato chips on 20 August 1934 at 450 East Wallace Street, Fort Wayne.
Fort Wayne
- 1934–todayThe answer · law, laboratory and task force
The federal bank robbery act — the ancestor of today's 18 U.S.C. § 2113 — was enacted in May 1934, in the anti-crime legislation of the Dillinger spring, and it is the charge on Parker's indictment in 1958, on Perez's in 1965, and on the federal cases of the present century.
Fort Wayne
- 1935The returns I: otter and beaver, the fur animals back
The return is exact: in 1935 the Indiana Department of Conservation obtained a few breeding pairs from Wisconsin and released them at Jasper-Pulaski Fish & Wildlife Area, followed by strategic relocations.
Fort Wayne
- 1935–1959The Potterf years and the used-book hunts
Rex M. Potterf took over as head librarian in January 1935. He came out of the schools: he had headed the social-science department at Central High School, and he had no library training when he was hired, a gap he repaired by earning his library degree afterward.
Fort Wayne
- 1935–todayThe credit unions — the working city's banks
The International Harvester Company Fort Wayne Works Employees Federal Credit Union was organised 14 February 1935 — its federal charter approved 28 February 1935, by the credit union's own published history only the 159th granted in the United States…
Fort Wayne
- 1936The color line, and the Green Book's Fort Wayne
What Fort Wayne offered them instead was a parallel lodging economy of tourist homes — rooms in private houses, run mostly by women, listed year by year in The Negro Motorist Green Book , Victor H. Green's guide published from 1936 to 1967.
Fort Wayne
- 1936The stage and screen awards: an Oscar nomination, an Emmy, a Tony, a Grammy
Carole Lombard, born Jane Alice Peters in Fort Wayne on 6 October 1908, received the only Academy Award nomination of her career — Best Actress, for My Man Godfrey — at the awards honoring the films of 1936; the Oscar went to Luise Rainer.
Fort Wayne
- 1936–1946The sit-down era and the 1946 GE strike
General Motors' own corporate histories list Fort Wayne among the plants to which the 1936–37 sit-down strike spread from Flint, and record that in the outlying plants — Fort Wayne's among them — the shutdowns were peaceful; the strike ended on 11 February 1937 with GM's recognition of the United Auto Workers.
Fort Wayne
- 1937Set here, shot elsewhere: the Fort Wayne of the story
Behind these stand the pure mentions: MGM's Mama Steps Out (1937), whose family is from Fort Wayne and leaves it for Europe, and the treasured local tradition that George Taylor, Charlton Heston's astronaut in Planet of the Apes (1968), learned to write at Jefferson School in Fort Wayne…
Fort Wayne
- 1937–1957The Zollner Pistons whole, 1937–1957
Fred Zollner , founder of the Zollner Corporation — "Zollner Piston — the piston that made good" — organized his company team in 1937, playing out of North Side High School's gym against the independents of the industrial Midwest.
Fort Wayne
- 1937–1957The Zollner Pistons, 1937–1957
In 1937 he put the company name on a semi-professional basketball team, the Zollner Pistons , and ran it the way he ran the factory: he recruited the best players in the country by offering them skilled jobs in the plant, and the team that resulted dominated its world.
Fort Wayne
- 1938General Electric · superchargers, then engine controls
The turbosupercharger plant: GE's Fort Wayne Works — its civil record from Jenney Electric forward is in the Business record and its Broadway campus in the Architecture record — was asked as early as 1938 to develop motors for military aircraft.
Fort Wayne
- 1938The production layer: industrial shops, one studio dream, and a festival
How films got made here: Fort Wayne's earliest surviving motion-picture portrait is a civic one: seventeen minutes of the city filmed in 1938 — streetcars on Main Street, the Baltes and Keenan hotels, the Pennsylvania depot, the Emboyd and Paramount theater marquees, the International Harvester and General Electric plants…
Fort Wayne
- 1938The count today: what the checklists say lives here
The Fort Wayne Christmas Bird Count of 24 December 1938, printed in Bird-Lore and recovered by the Stockbridge Audubon Society — itself founded in 1899…
Fort Wayne
- 1938–1909Central Catholic High School
In 1938 the boys' school and St. Augustine Academy for girls were merged into a co-educational Central Catholic — the city's first co-educational Catholic high school — in a new building on Cathedral Square, dedicated by Bishop John F. Noll on January 8, 1939.
Fort Wayne
- 1938–1963The organizing record · the NAACP, the clubs, and Dr. King's visit
In 1938 the Republicans nominated William Briggs for justice of the peace for Wayne Township — Morgan calls him the first Black candidate in the city's history — and he held the office until his death in 1950.
Fort Wayne
- 1939Trucks to Russia, chargers to the sky: the wartime outward trade
It began before American entry: in 1939, fearful that German bombing would destroy its English factory, Rolls-Royce chose Fort Wayne to build starter motors for British military aircraft, and the British government relocated construction of key fighter-aircraft parts to GE facilities in the United States in the same…
Fort Wayne
- 1939The defense city · an overview
Why the work came here: Fort Wayne's defense industry grew from the same base as its civil industry — magnet wire, motors and electrical manufacturing, deep in the interior, on three railroads' and three rivers' ground…
Fort Wayne
- 1939The drive-ins, I: the 1939 experiment and the Fort Wayne Drive-In
Fort Wayne's first drive-in, 1939: The drive-in came to Fort Wayne before the war.
Fort Wayne
- 1939–1945GE at war: Broadway, Taylor Street, and Decatur
As early as 1938 the Fort Wayne Works was being asked to develop motors for military aircraft; in 1939, fearing German bombing of its English factory, Rolls-Royce chose Fort Wayne to build starter motors for military aircraft…
Fort Wayne
- 1939–1960Rubber replaces rail — the conversion, 1939–1960
The conversion, when it came, came from the Indiana Service Corporation and it came by petition: in December 1939 the corporation asked the Indiana Public Service Commission for authority to substitute trackless trolley and bus service for 21 of the 58 miles of Fort Wayne streetcar line still running.
Fort Wayne
- 1939–1967Philo Farnsworth: television's inventor, and Fort Wayne's factory
He came to this city as the most consequential independent inventor in electronics, a man who had beaten RCA in the patent fight over television itself, and he came to manufacture: in 1938 his Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation reorganized and bought the Fort Wayne factory of the Capehart Corporation, the…
Fort Wayne
- 1939–1987The drive-ins: the family car as a theatre seat
The first screen under the sky: Cinema Treasures' Fort Wayne record, which is comment-grade and warns in its own text that its listings may have to be split, gives the city a drive-in at the very start of the form: a theatre opened on 30 May 1939, reported in the Motion Picture Herald of 24 June 1939 as opened by Roy…
Fort Wayne