Allen County, Indiana · 20th century
1960s
64 dated events in 1960s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
20th century 64 dated mentions
1960s
- 1960Time capsules: the messages the city sent itself
Buried in 1960, addressed to 1994: Fort Wayne's best-documented capsule was a broadcaster's.
Fort Wayne
- 1960Anthony Wayne Services, Benchmark, and the AWS Foundation
Founding: The line begins in 1960, when a community volunteer committee that had been studying work-related services for people with disabilities founded the Community Coordinating Center for Rehabilitation and Health Services.
Fort Wayne
- 1960Night of Evil (1962): the Fort Wayne-made feature
Night of Evil was shot in Fort Wayne in the summer of 1960 (the Allen County Genealogical Society's account extends the shooting into the fall) and was based, the trade press reported, on the life story of Dixie Ann Dikes, a beauty queen who landed in jail for attempted robbery.
Fort Wayne
- 1960The hometown film producers, in brief
Richard Galbreath, whose Galbreath Pictures made industrial films and television commercials for the city's factories, produced and directed the Fort Wayne-made feature Night of Evil (filmed 1960, premiered at the Embassy in 1962).
Fort Wayne
- 1960The believers and the skeptics: Fort Wayne's investigators
Indiana's organized investigation began with NICAP: Francis Ridge of Vincennes was appointed chairman of Indiana Unit No. 1 of NICAP in 1960, and from 1973 to 1995 he directed the UFO Filter Center at Mt. Vernon, Indiana, whose Regional Sighting Information Database logged more than 4,000 sightings across Indiana…
Fort Wayne
- 1960–1980The Scout: designed in Fort Wayne, built in Fort Wayne
The vehicle and its run: Production ran in a plant adjacent to the truck works from November 1960 to October 1980.
Fort Wayne
- 1960–2026The parish as festival: Greek Fest and the heritage calendar
Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church was founded in Fort Wayne in 1960, in Whatzup's account, its spokesman Frank Makridakis the son of immigrants who arrived in 1967.
Fort Wayne
- 1961The heart years begin: Lutheran's run of firsts, 1961–1970
Lutheran Hospital — whose institutional history is the Hospitals record's, cross-referenced here — assembled, between 1961 and 1970, the sequence of firsts on which its heart program still rests, as the network's own timeline states them, each at its claimed scope.
Fort Wayne
- 1961The Indiana History and Genealogy Room opens
Opening: Fred Reynolds opened the Indiana History and Genealogy Room on 3 January 1961, in a corner of the Carnegie building.
Fort Wayne
- 1961The smaller family foundations: McMillen, Freimann, Auer, Cole, and a wind-down
McMillen and Freimann: The feed-and-soya fortune of Dale McMillen took permanent form in the Harold and Rachel McMillen Foundation, created in 1961 for Allen County purposes, and the McMillen Foundation that donated and helped construct McMillen Park (both in the Wealth section).
Fort Wayne
- 1961Seated here, II: the Fort Wayne Baseball Hall of Fame
The founding: The city's baseball oldtimers, gathered since the 1940s, reorganized as the Fort Wayne Oldtimers Baseball Association, and at their meeting of 16 October 1961 co-chairmen Red Carrington and Elmer Wagner announced the formation of a Fort Wayne Baseball Hall of Fame, naming Lou Holterman and James "Hub"…
Fort Wayne
- 1961Wilt's 3,000th point, in a borrowed home game
The Fort Wayne Pistons had left for Detroit in 1957, but on 10 March 1961 the Detroit club staged a home game in its old building, the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum, against the Philadelphia Warriors — and that night Wilt Chamberlain became the first player in NBA history to score 3,000 points in a single season.
Fort Wayne
- 1961August 1961: the Freeman family's object
Dennett's 2024 compilation reports that in August 1961 John Freeman and his family, of Fort Wayne, reported an object "like two big bowls, one on top of the other, with a flashing light on top," hovering at treetop level; after a few seconds it rose silently and climbed rapidly out of sight.
Fort Wayne
- 1961–1968The manager held overnight · the robbery of November 20, 1961
The crime: on the night of Sunday, November 19, 1961, three men — Julian Perez, Jesse Paramo and Manuel Zurita — got into the home of a Fort Wayne bank manager on the pretense of being deputy sheriffs, and held the manager and his wife captive through the night.
Fort Wayne
- 1961–2007The firehouse firsts — Ridley, Wilson and Davie
Richard Ridley Jr.: Richard Jerome Ridley Jr. was sworn in on 7 October 1961 as Fort Wayne's first African American firefighter.
Fort Wayne
- 1962Karting: where Baer Field began
Baer Field itself began as a go-kart track in 1962, two years before the half-mile rose beside it; when the original kart layout was given up, a 1/10-mile kart oval was built in the big track's infield, and the 1999 expansion added a dirt kart track outside the paved ovals, so that karts raced at Baer Field in every decade of its life.
Fort Wayne
- 1962The ledger of losses
A decade earlier the Paramount Theatre, the 1930 movie palace, had been demolished in 1962 — its record is in the Theaters section — and in 2002 the Snyderman House, one of Michael Graves's first two Fort Wayne houses, was lost to arson.
Fort Wayne
- 1962–1968The fusor: fusion demonstrated in a Fort Wayne laboratory
The patents are in his own name with Fort Wayne on the face of them: U.S. Patent No. 3,258,402, "Electric discharge device for producing interactions between nuclei," filed 11 January 1962 and issued 28 June 1966, assigned to ITT…
Fort Wayne
- 1963The first fight: saving the Landing, 1963–1965
A student survey starts it: In the fall of 1963 the senior class of the University of Notre Dame's School of Architecture made the first architectural survey of the 100 block of West Columbia Street — the canal-era commercial row that had been the city's first business district…
Fort Wayne
- 1963Decline and the downtown gap, 1963–1985
The Randall, residential and faded, was razed in 1963 on Winifred Randall's death. The Hedekin — by then the Home Hotel — came down in the Columbia Street clearances of 1968–69.
Fort Wayne
- 1963The locomotive that wore another engine's number
So in 1963 the numbers were switched: the sound 765 went into the park wearing 767's number, and the true 767 — the engine the city had actually wanted — went to scrap wearing 765's.
Fort Wayne
- 1963–todayBishop Dwenger High School
Founded: Dwenger opened on 4 September 1963 at 1300 East Washington Center Road, the north-side half of Bishop Leo Pursley's two-school answer to a crowded Central Catholic.
Fort Wayne
- 1964Marion and Vern Ward, and Gail Cole — the pattern shop in the knitting mill
On 18 May 1964 Marion and Vern Ward opened the doors of Ward Pattern & Engineering Company in the former Wayne Knitting Mills building on Growth Avenue — a small pattern shop with three employees and 1,500 square feet, and first-year sales of $90,000.
Fort Wayne
- 1964Baer Field Speedway: the track by the airport
In 1962 a small go-kart track was laid out in the back field of John Weisenauer's farm at 4331 Winters Road, next to the airport that carried Paul Baer's name (the airfield's own record is in the Airports and Military sections); the half-mile paved oval was built in the summer of 1963 and the first races ran in 1964.
Fort Wayne
- 1964The Old Fort as an open-air museum
Historic Fort Wayne, Inc. was established in 1964 to plan a reconstruction of the 1815–16 post from Major John Whistler's 1814 drawings; the Historical Society announced its own "Historic Old Fort Wayne" initiative in 1966, and the project — costing nearly 1.5 million dollars…
Fort Wayne
- 196422 May 1964: calls to the Baer Field tower
The report: The Fort Wayne newspaper glance of 1986 preserves one airport case in a single line: "May 22, 1964: The tower at Baer Field received numerous calls about 'four orange-yellow objects' that 'flashed rhythmically with intense flashes.'" No official file, disposition or fuller newspaper account of the night…
Fort Wayne
- 1964DeHaven Chevrolet: one family, three generations, one near-death
The founding: Jack DeHaven Sr. founded DeHaven Chevrolet in 1964, in the middle of the postwar trade's best decade, and the house joined the city's Chevrolet succession in the years when Grieger's long run was ending: for a brief time DeHaven traded from Grieger's own ground at 1500 South Clinton, its jingle adjusted…
Fort Wayne
- 1964–todayWard Pattern & Engineering Company → Ward Aluminum Casting, Inc. → Ward Corporation (Ward Corp.)
Founded: 18 May 1964, Fort Wayne.
Fort Wayne
- 1964–todayThe freight city that remains — and the trains that are only proposed
Norfolk Southern — heir through Norfolk and Western to the Wabash (leased 1964) and the Nickel Plate (1964) — works the city's busiest lines: the former Nickel Plate main east and west (its Chicago District toward Chicago and Fostoria District toward Bellevue and Buffalo), the Wabash line as the Huntington District…
Fort Wayne
- 1964–todaySnider High School
Founded: Snider began in the fall of 1964 with 325 sophomores, 20 faculty and four administrators, the first new public high school Fort Wayne had built in thirty-nine years.
Fort Wayne
- 1964–todayThe scout trail: Pokagon-Kekionga, and hiking as local history
The Pokagon-Kekionga Trails Committee was formed in 1964 as a service project by Explorer Post 2162 of Garrett and Troop 352 of Fort Wayne.
Fort Wayne
- 1965The zoo: a cross-reference, by design
The pointer: The Fort Wayne Children's Zoo, officially opened in 1965 on the Franke Park ground seeded by Fred Shoaff's 1952 sanctuary gift, is the city's signature children's attraction, and it is deliberately not an article of this section.
Fort Wayne
- 1965The law of keeping: the ordinances and the Commission
From a mayor's commission to a code chapter: The 1965 ordinance created the Mayor's Commission on the Preservation and Restoration of Historical Landmarks, the body that survives today as the Fort Wayne Historic Preservation Commission.
Fort Wayne
- 1965The designation record: districts, landmarks, and the counts
Local designation came first and came early: the Landing and the Chief Richardville House, 1965, under Indiana's first preservation ordinance.
Fort Wayne
- 1965The garage era: bands, radio studios, and records of their own
The Male Men, North Side High School students, were picked in October 1965 as the house band of WPTA Channel 21's Saturday-afternoon teen show 21 A Go Go, showcasing other local bands weekly until February 1966, when the show ended amid union complaints that the musicians were non-union; in 1967 they made a demo at WGL Radio.
Fort Wayne
- 1965–1966The Fort Wayne Zoological Society
The Fort Wayne Children's Zoo opened 3 July 1965 in Franke Park — 500,000 dollars raised, 5.5 acres, 18 exhibits — on land the park board had set aside for a nature preserve in 1952.
Fort Wayne
- 1965–1968Public ownership — the Public Transportation Corporation, 1968
The Indiana mechanism: Fort Wayne's takeover followed the path Indiana law had laid down in the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1965, whose machinery the Court of Appeals later described in the Fort Wayne case itself.
Fort Wayne
- 1965–1983The mall decades, and downtown's slide
Preservation scored an early win on the old canal ground: The Landing , the Columbia Street warehouse row, was dedicated as a protected historic district on 23 October 1965 after a citizen campaign in which Mayor Harold Zeis and local advocates beat back clearance plans.
Fort Wayne
- 1965–1994The Wells Years: Zoo Mobile, the Veldt, and 550 Animals
From eighteen exhibits and five and a half acres in 1965, the zoo had become a mid-sized American zoo with a volunteer corps nearly as large as its paid staff — the community-built character of the founding, carried into operations.
Fort Wayne
- 1965–todayHead Start in Fort Wayne
Founded: 1965, the year the federal Head Start program began. Two operators stood it up in Fort Wayne at once.
Fort Wayne
- 1966The other Columbia Street: the clearance of 1966
The city's own preservation history calls the demolition of East Columbia Street, beginning in the fall of 1966, only months after West Columbia became a local historic district, "the most obvious illustration of Urban Renewal in Fort Wayne": scores of historic commercial buildings, from Calhoun Street east to Clay…
Fort Wayne
- 1966Pine Valley Country Club
The club's own present account dates its founding to 1966 and describes more than 160 acres on Pine Mills Road, and a brochure for the development survives from that same year, 1966, promising "golf at your doorstep."
Fort Wayne
- 1966Glenbrook Square: the region's mall
The Journal Gazette's construction photographs, republished in its Throwback Thursday series, show the giant taking shape through 1966; the mall opened in October of that year with some seventy stores.
Fort Wayne
- 1966The Holiday houses: Northcrest's twin and six-plex
The Holiday Theatre at 949 Northcrest Shopping Center opened as a single-screen house with Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines — the advertisement-based record dates the opening to March 4, 1966, while a local summary gives 1969…
Fort Wayne
- 1966September 1966: the Federal Building sighting and the Blue Book file
At 1450 Zulu (10:50 a.m. local) on 8 September 1966, two deputy clerks of the U.S. District Court, watching from the second floor of the Federal Building in Fort Wayne, observed a single circular object — "overall shape resembled two soup bowls, the upper bowl inverted and the rim of the bowls mated"…
Fort Wayne
- 1966The Society and the Self-Supporting Model
The society: In 1966, the year after the opening, the Fort Wayne Zoological Society was formed — the parks chronology carries the line in a single entry.
Fort Wayne
- 19679 March 1967: the minister's X of lights
The report: NICAP's chronology for 1967 — built from the organization's files and the Blue Book archive — carries a Fort Wayne entry in full: "March 9, 1967; Fort Wayne, IN.
Fort Wayne
- 1967–1968Georgetown Square: the neighborhood center that outlasted the malls
A Journal Gazette photograph of the first phase's groundbreaking — for a Lincoln National Bank & Trust branch and the ninth Rogers Market — is dated November 2, 1967, a season ahead of the center's own dating of its first groundbreaking to 1968; the record carries both, the photograph and the anniversary.
Fort Wayne
- 1968A new Main: the 1968 building
The new building, designed by Bradley and Bradley Architects (Carl Bradley), rose at Wayne and Webster streets with 173,500 square feet at a cost of 3,000,000 dollars, and was dedicated on 21 August 1968.
Fort Wayne
- 1968Sharon Wichman: sixteen years old, and Fort Wayne's first Olympic gold
Mexico City: On 24 October 1968, at sixteen, Wichman won the 200-meter breaststroke in an Olympic record 2 minutes 44.4 seconds, the first American woman ever to win that event at an Olympic Games, and added a bronze medal in the 100-meter breaststroke.
Fort Wayne
- 1968–today
- 1968–todayMartin Luther King Montessori School
Founded: 1968, in direct response to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Three Fort Wayne women — Dottie Fitchey, Dorothy Holt and Mary Hoban — founded the school to give low-income preschool children a Montessori education.
Fort Wayne
- 1969The river as amenity: festivals, trails, and the facing of the water
The last turn is back toward the banks: The city that had walled its rivers off behind dikes announced its change of heart, characteristically, with a party: the Three Rivers Festival, founded in 1969 and named outright for the confluence, drew an estimated 100,000 people to its first edition and a parade and sixty…
Fort Wayne
- 1969The Soap Box Derby at Franke Park
On March 24, 1969, Tom Chapman, secretary of Fort Wayne Soap Box Derby, Inc., broke ground for a purpose-built derby track in Franke Park, and on July 20, 1969, the first Fort Wayne Soap Box Derby ran down it: sixty cars, boys aged eleven to fifteen, the winner taking a $500 savings bond and a paid trip to Derby Downs…
Fort Wayne
- 1969Blackhawk Ministries
The church — legally Blackhawk Baptist Church, Inc., today Blackhawk Ministries — was founded in 1969 and first led by Dr. David Jeremiah, newly arrived from Cedarville College; it began in two side-by-side modular trailers on East State Boulevard.
Fort Wayne
- 1969The headquartered denominations
In 1969 it merged with the United Missionary Church — the merger convention met in Detroit — to form the Missionary Church, an evangelical denomination whose national office remains in Fort Wayne, on Vanguard Drive, serving some 492 United States congregations as of 2025.
Fort Wayne
- 1969Southtown Mall: the second mall, and the first to die
Melvin Simon & Associates of Indianapolis opened it in stages through 1969 — the Wolf & Dessauer store's grand opening came on March 10 and the mall-wide dedication on September 16 — with three anchors: JCPenney, Montgomery Ward, and a Wolf & Dessauer that became an L.S. Ayres when Ayres absorbed the chain.
Fort Wayne
- 1969The Zoo in the City's School Life
The Zoo Mobile of 1969 — established by Earl Wells, in the sanctuary's old circus-wagon line — visited every third-grade classroom in Allen County: the zoo did not wait for the schools to come to Franke Park, but carried its animals to the county's children where they sat.
Fort Wayne
- 1969–1972The Odyssey — invented elsewhere, engineered here, built in Tennessee
Baer demonstrated the Brown Box to Magnavox management in the company's Fort Wayne boardroom — Indianapolis Monthly dates the demonstration to 17 July 1969; the Odyssey FAQ compiled from Baer's book dates his demonstration to Fort Wayne's television-set engineering, production and marketing management to 17 July 1970.
Fort Wayne
- 1969–1978Cole Precision Castings
Founded: 1969, Fort Wayne. The Ward Corporation company history timeline dates the start directly: in 1969 Marion Ward's brother Gail Cole started an aluminum foundry, Cole Precision Castings.
Fort Wayne
- 1969–2025The festival city: Three Rivers and Johnny Appleseed
Three Rivers: In July 1969 Fort Wayne gave its gathering instinct a subject: itself.
Fort Wayne
- 1969–2025Three Rivers Festival: the children's parade and the 527-foot hot dog
The first summer: The Three Rivers Festival, which for most of its life was the family summer in Fort Wayne compressed into nine days, began on 12 July 1969 with an estimated 100,000 people at a grand parade and 60 events on the Columbia Street Landing…
Fort Wayne
- 1969–2025The street fair downtown: Three Rivers, in fair terms only
It began on 12 July 1969 with an estimated 100,000 people at a grand parade and 60 events on the Columbia Street Landing, ran nine days in mid-July, and grew to be called Indiana's second-largest summer festival, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit funded entirely by vendor participation fees, souvenir and refreshment sales…
Fort Wayne
- 1969–todayIvy Tech Fort Wayne
Fort Wayne instruction began in the summer of 1969 in leased space in the former Concordia Lutheran High School building at 1711 Maumee Ave — the building Concordia had left in 1964 — with two programs: Drafting Technology and Secretarial Sciences.
Fort Wayne