Allen County, Indiana · 20th century
1970s
90 dated events in 1970s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
20th century 90 dated mentions
1970s
- 1970Islam in Fort Wayne: the Islamic Center and Masjid Al-Quds
The institutions: Organized Muslim life in Fort Wayne dates, in the community's own scholarly account, to 1970, when the Islamic Center of Fort Wayne was founded…
Fort Wayne
- 1970Don Ayres Honda: a Honda store from Honda's first American year
The founding: Don Ayres founded his Honda store in Fort Wayne in 1970 — the date the house gives for itself, and a date with a significance beyond the family.
Fort Wayne
- 1970–2026The judges — Gull, Davis and Surbeck; Lee and Brady in the federal court
William C. Lee, born here 2 February 1938 and a North Side High School graduate of 1955, was named United States Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana at thirty-one, serving March 1970 to May 1973…
Fort Wayne
- 1971The merger that never happened
Fifty years of maybe: Fort Wayne and Allen County have shared a building since 1971 and a second building, Citizens Square, since 2011 — and have never merged a single department into a single government.
Fort Wayne
- 1971The Bowmar Brain: the first American pocket calculator
In the autumn of 1971 Bowmar shipped the 901B, the "Bowmar Brain": a four-function calculator with an eight-digit red LED display, measuring about 5.2 by 3.0 by 1.5 inches, priced at $240, built around a single Texas Instruments calculator chip…
Fort Wayne
- 1971Jim Ash and Tim Ash — the brokerage general agency
He founded Ash Brokerage in Fort Wayne in 1971 — a Broker World award notice of December 2023 gives the founding as 1970, "with one part time employee," and the variant stands here beside the company's own 1971 — beginning with three employees in what is now the STAR Bank building.
Fort Wayne
- 1971Save the Embassy: two days to spare
When the Indiana Hotel closed in 1971, the plan on the table was to convert the hotel to senior housing and demolish the theatre beside it for a parking lot of sixty-five cars.
Fort Wayne
- 1971The vacant city hall: a million-dollar second life
On March 11, 1971, Mayor Harold Zeis proclaimed the new City-County Building the home of municipal government and walked the city's employees out of the 1893 sandstone building at Berry and Barr.
Fort Wayne
- 1971The gay bars: Tulisa's to After Dark
April 29, 1971: Fort Wayne's gay-bar record begins on a single dated night.
Fort Wayne
- 1971The national pattern, in brief
Time treated it as a cover-worthy behavior story on February 8, 1971, under the title "The American Way of Swinging," and Nena and George O'Neill's Open Marriage (1972) put negotiated non-monogamy on the bestseller lists — the book the era's couples cited, and its authors later said was widely misread.
Fort Wayne
- 1971–1981The Reynolds Historical Genealogy Collection
The naming: On 25 January 1971 the board renamed the genealogy collection the Reynolds Historical Genealogy Collection, in honor of the man who had built it; Reynolds called it "one of the five best in the country."
Fort Wayne
- 1971–2006Charlie Brandt · the killer Fort Wayne raised, whose series was Florida's
On the night of January 3, 1971, a day after the family returned from its Christmas vacation in Florida, the thirteen-year-old took his father's handgun and shot both of his parents in their Fort Wayne home.
Fort Wayne
- 1971–today
- 1971–todayThe Anthis lineage — the Central building after 1971
Course: When Central High School closed in 1971, its 1904 building at 1200 South Barr Street became the Fort Wayne Regional Vocational High School, the district's vocational center.
Fort Wayne
- 1971–todayWayne High School
Founded: Wayne opened in 1971 at 9100 Winchester Road, one of the two high schools opened the year Central closed, taking the southern side of the attendance map the board redrew to desegregate the city high schools.
Fort Wayne
- 1971–todayNorthrop High School
Founded: Northrop opened in 1971 at 7001 Coldwater Road, the north-side half of the settlement that ended Central High School.
Fort Wayne
- 1972Georgetown Branch
Ground was broken in September 1971, and the branch opened on 27 November 1972, with Patricia Moorman as librarian — the largest of five branches then being built or relocated, in one of the metropolitan area's fastest-growing sections.
Fort Wayne
- 1972A museum that moves: Nickel Plate 765 and the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society
The Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society, formed in 1972 to put a steam locomotive back under power, leased the engine from the city, pulled it from the park in September 1974, and rebuilt it with unpaid volunteers at New Haven from 1975 to 1979; in September 1979 the 765 ran under its own steam for the first time since 1963.
Fort Wayne
- 1972Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northeast Indiana
Founding: Big Brothers of Greater Fort Wayne was founded on 8 February 1972 — the date the agency's own 50th-anniversary history carries; a 2006 Congressional Record tribute gives August 1972, and the two dates are carried here side by side, the agency's own the primary.
Fort Wayne
- 1972English-Bonter-Mitchell: the Fort Wayne fortune administered from Pittsburgh
The structure: Mary Tower English, her sister-in-law Louise Bonter and her daughter Elizabeth (Betty) Mitchell created the English-Bonter-Mitchell Foundation in 1972 in honor of Dr. Calvin English, a founder of the Lincoln Life Insurance Company (the fortune's story is in the Wealth section).
Fort Wayne
- 1972The English-Bonter-Mitchell founding gift: three friends endow a physician's memory
The gift: The English-Bonter-Mitchell Foundation was created in 1972 by three friends — Mary Tower English, Louise Bonter and Elizabeth (Betty) Mitchell…
Fort Wayne
- 1972The Marketplace of Canterbury: the strip center that became an entertainment district
The Marketplace of Canterbury began as an ordinary thing: a Tudor-styled neighborhood center of about 89,650 square feet, built in 1972 on St. Joe Road to serve the Canterbury Green development then rising around its golf course and the young university campus nearby.
Fort Wayne
- 1972Ethan Sandler: the writer-producer's ladder
In front of the camera first: Ethan Sandler was born in Fort Wayne on 3 December 1972 and raised in the city before Northwestern University, where he met his future wife, the actress Kathryn Hahn.
Fort Wayne
- 1972–1976The Lebamoff years
Ivan A. Lebamoff (born 20 July 1932 in Fort Wayne, of Macedonian descent; Indiana University 1954 and its law school 1957; chairman of the Allen County Democratic Party from 1968) beat the incumbent Republican Harold Zeis in 1971 by more than 3,500 votes and took office in 1972…
Fort Wayne
- 1972–2018The 1970s settlement · Fort Wayne Feminists and the Women's Bureau
Women's Studies at the Fort Wayne campus began in 1971–72 — the program dates its inception to 1971, and its first course, in the psychology of women, was offered in the spring of 1972; a Women's Studies minor followed in 1976.
Fort Wayne
- 1972–todayHelmke Library at Purdue Fort Wayne
The Book Walk: When the campus's four-story library building was finished in 1972 it lacked only its books.
Fort Wayne
- 1973The Mexican table arrives: El Azteca, Bandido's, Salsa Grille
It opened in 1973 in the former Helmsing's Lighthouse Restaurant on East State Boulevard, and its opening night entered the city's restaurant folklore on the magazine's telling — the retained Lighthouse cooks all quit on the first night, and co-owner Michael Ray took off his sports coat and cooked.
Fort Wayne
- 1973Young voices: the Children's Choir and the youth orchestras
In 1973, music teacher Jocelyn Basse founded the Children of Peace Choristers to give area children the choral time school schedules could not; she began with about twenty singers.
Fort Wayne
- 1973The National Women's Hall of Fame: Alice Hamilton
She received the Albert Lasker Public Service Award in 1947, died in 1970 at the age of 101, and in 1973 was inducted posthumously into the National Women's Hall of Fame at Seneca Falls, in the Hall's first class.
Fort Wayne
- 1973–2011Paul Harding High School (East Allen County Schools)
The school was established in 1973. Course: Enrollment peaked at 1,235 in 1974–75.
Fort Wayne
- 1973–2025One building of nine: the Arts United Center opens, 1973
The opening: Construction followed the working drawings Kahn's office completed by the summer of 1970, and the Theatre of Performing Arts was inaugurated in a weeklong grand opening from 30 September to 6 October 1973, with Kahn on hand.
Fort Wayne
- 1973–todayBlackhawk Christian School
Founded: Blackhawk Christian was established in 1973 by David Jeremiah for the children of Blackhawk Baptist Church and the northeast side of Fort Wayne.
Fort Wayne
- 1974Heather Headley — Trinidad to Northrop High School to a Tony and a Grammy
Formed in Fort Wayne: Heather Headley was born in Barataria, Trinidad, on 5 October 1974. In 1989, at fifteen, she moved with her family to Fort Wayne, where her father had been called as pastor of the McKee Street Church of God.
Fort Wayne
- 1974Two modern foundings, briefly — Asher and Petroleum Traders
The Asher Agency was founded in Fort Wayne in 1974 as a government-relations agency — in the company's own fiftieth-anniversary account of June 2024, "founded by Fort Wayne native Tim Borne in 1974"…
Fort Wayne
- 1974The Fort Wayne Firefighters Museum
The last pumper company moved out on 20 July 1972 after seventy-eight years of service, and the building was nearly razed for a parking lot in 1974.
Fort Wayne
- 1974Arena Dinner Theatre
When the Parks Department eliminated its funding, the company re-founded itself as Arena Dinner Theatre in January 1974, opening in the Anthony Wayne Ballroom of the Chamber of Commerce building at Wayne and Ewing — a ten-year relationship.
Fort Wayne
- 1974The great campaigns: Fort Wayne's habit of the joint ask
The Embassy Theatre's 1974 rescue turned on Robert Goldstine's $250,000 challenge (the theatre is in the Arts section); the arts then federated the ask itself — Arts United's Renaissance Campaign of 1989 consolidated the campus organizations' fundraising the way the United Way had federated charity in 1922.
Fort Wayne
- 1974Cork 'N Cleaver: the chain that shrank to three, and Fort Wayne kept one
Fort Wayne's, at 221 East Washington Center Road, opened in 1974 by Indiana Connection magazine's account (a business-directory listing gives 1977; the magazine's date is followed here and the variant recorded).
Fort Wayne
- 1974The festival tables: pioneer, German, Greek
The Johnny Appleseed Festival, created in 1974 for the bicentennial of John Chapman's birth, is governed by food rules no other city festival imposes: vendors are invitation-only, cooking must be done over open wood or coal fires — no propane — in 1800s dress, and everything sold must have been available in Appleseed's century.
Fort Wayne
- 1974Arena Dinner Theatre
Parks Department budget cuts ended that arrangement, and in January 1974 the board re-founded the company as a separate not-for-profit under a new name — Arena Dinner Theatre — in the Anthony Wayne Ballroom of the Chamber of Commerce building at Wayne and Ewing streets, where dinner and a show in the round ran for ten years.
Fort Wayne
- 1974Jenna Fischer: a birth tie, printed at its size
The tie, exactly: Jenna Fischer was born Regina Marie Fischer in Fort Wayne on March 7, 1974, and left in infancy.
Fort Wayne
- 1974The modern record: the reporting databases
What the counts are: Since 1974 the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) has taken reports by hotline and web form, and its database is the modern record's backbone.
Fort Wayne
- 1974Jenna Fischer: born here, Pam Beesly to the world
The claim, at its true size: Regina Marie Fischer, known to the world as Jenna Fischer, was born on 7 March 1974 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and raised in St. Louis, Missouri.
Fort Wayne
- 1974The Johnny Appleseed Festival: history a child can eat
The founding: The Johnny Appleseed Festival began in 1974, on the 200th anniversary of John Chapman's birth, with a handful of vendors, about twenty of them, concentrated along Parnell Avenue on the west side of the present grounds…
Fort Wayne
- 1974–today
- 1974–todayAdrian R. Tio: the printmaker between two cultures
The career: He took his bachelor's at Temple University in 1974, studied with Temple's Tyler School of Art in Rome in 1975-76, and his master's in fine art at the University of Cincinnati in 1979.
Fort Wayne
- 1974–todayThe foot trails: Lindenwood, Fox Island and Eagle Marsh
Its three anchors are nature preserves, and two of them date to the same year, 1974, a year before Ernest Williams's greenway was first dreamed of in the record.
Fort Wayne
- 1975The refugee city begins · the Southeast Asians of 1975
Beginning in 1975, as the Vietnam War ended, thousands of refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Burma began arriving in Fort Wayne under the sponsorship system run by Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend — the agency that remains, a half-century later, the only federal resettlement agency in northern Indiana.
Fort Wayne
- 1975Charlie Savage — the Fort Wayne reporter who won a Pulitzer on presidential power
Born and raised in Fort Wayne: Charlie Savage was born in Fort Wayne in 1975 and grew up here. He graduated from Harvard College in 1998, reported for the Miami Herald, and joined the Boston Globe's Washington bureau in 2003, covering national security and legal policy in the years after the September 11 attacks.
Fort Wayne
- 1975ARCH: the organization, 1975 to its fiftieth year
A bicentennial committee that refused to disband: ARCH Inc. — the name, its founders insist, was never meant to stand for anything, though "Architecture and Community Heritage" came to be used as the tagline…
Fort Wayne
- 1975St. Mary's Soup Kitchen
Founding: The soup kitchen at St. Mary Mother of God parish began in 1975, when the pastor, Father Tom O'Connor, started serving soup to the poor from the back porch of his rectory — the soup made on the pastor's own stove.
Fort Wayne
- 1975Jill Bennett: the web-series producer who brought her feature home
From Fort Wayne stages to the festival circuit: Jill Bennett was born in Fort Wayne on 14 August 1975 and grew up in the city — acting from the age of sixteen, winning a state speech title, and leaving for Bradley University on a theatre scholarship.
Fort Wayne
- 1975Charlie Savage: the Pulitzer winner from the Journal Gazette's newsroom
The claim: Charlie Savage was born in 1975 in Fort Wayne and raised here, and unlike several entries in this section, his Fort Wayne chapter includes his first professional formation.
Fort Wayne
- 1975–1987The dream of 1975: an editor, a consortium, and nine miles
"It all started back in 1975," George DeRoche, president of the Greenway Consortium, told The Waynedale News in September 2005.
Fort Wayne
- 1975–todayThe keepers of the record · museums, monuments, and the mayor's office
The society that preserved it: In 1975 two Fort Wayne teachers, Hana L. Stith and Miles Edwards , began working with the county historical museum to gather a Black history no institution had kept — the founding act of the African/African-American Historical Society of Allen County.
Fort Wayne
- 1976The fort ordered out of the floodway
Built first, permitted never: Historic Fort Wayne built the Old Fort replica in 1976 on the banks of the St. Marys River — without the prior approval of the Natural Resources Commission, in the regulatory floodway.
Fort Wayne
- 1976Wes Malott — the PBA Hall of Famer who bowls out of Fort Wayne
The tie, stated precisely: Wesley Clint Malott was born in Austin, Texas, on 26 October 1976 and comes from Pflugerville, Texas.
Fort Wayne
- 1976March 4, 1976 · the robbery whose record is a shooting
What the record holds: a bank robbery occurred in Fort Wayne on the morning of March 4, 1976 — the federal court opinion that preserves the day does not name the bank, and no account of the robbers themselves is in the record reached for this section.
Fort Wayne
- 1976WBCL: faith on the FM dial
WBCL signed on 8 January 1976 from Fort Wayne Bible College — the college's 1976 yearbook, The Guidon , calls it "Fort Wayne's first and only non-commercial radio station," broadcasting contemporary Christian music at 50,000 watts from studios at 1115 West Rudisill Boulevard.
Fort Wayne
- 1976Gentlemen's clubs: the adult rooms and the courts
The earliest date in that record belongs to a building, not a name: the property at 1407 South Calhoun Street was used as a sexually oriented business from approximately 1976 until October 2016, as the federal court's statement of facts puts it — forty years of adult use on a downtown-edge street.
Fort Wayne
- 1976Pine Valley and Coldwater Crossing: the power-center north
Property listings date its original construction to 1976 and put the center at 91,024 square feet; the grocery anchor is documented at the corner from 1990, when directory research shows a Scott's supermarket at 10201 Coldwater Road, a store that trades today as a Kroger Marketplace, shadow-anchored beside a Walgreens.
Fort Wayne
- 1976Cinema Center: film as art
Fort Wayne Cinema Center was founded in 1976 with first funding from the Fort Wayne Bicentennial Committee; its first presentation was Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep , shown on September 11, 1976, in the Fort Wayne Art School auditorium in West Central.
Fort Wayne
- 1976Cinema Center and the Spectator: the art-house thread
Before it stood the Spectator Theater, the city's last art and specialty movie house, on The Landing; when the Spectator lost its lease, a group of film enthusiasts founded Fort Wayne Cinema Center in 1976 to fill the void, opening with The Big Sleep at the Fort Wayne Art School auditorium on September 11, 1976, with…
Fort Wayne
- 1976Television: segments, stock shots, and one famous courthouse
The syndicated magazine format Evening Magazine , which ran nationally from 1976 to 1989 through local station franchises, produced segments filmed in Fort Wayne, as the genealogical society's video record documents.
Fort Wayne
- 1976Matt Vogel: two gold medals in two days at Montreal
At the 1976 Olympic trials Vogel finished third in the 100-meter butterfly, behind Joe Bottom and Gary Hall, barely on the team.
Fort Wayne
- 1976–1980The Armstrong years
He had run for council in 1971, the year Lebamoff won the mayor's office; four years later he took the office from him by 384 votes and served 1976–1979, the city's list reads, as the 30th mayor.
Fort Wayne
- 1977The friendship layer: sister cities
The city holds four sister-city affiliations designated through Sister Cities International — Takaoka, Japan (1977), Płock, Poland (1990), Gera, Germany (1992) and Taizhou, China (2012) — and a friendship-city tie to Mawlamyine, Myanmar (2015), the last a recognition of the Burmese community that had made Fort Wayne its American center.
Fort Wayne
- 1977Casa: two friends, a St. Louis recipe book, and four dining rooms
The Italian dynasty: In 1977 Tom Casaburo and Jimmy D'Angelo — friends, neither with any restaurant experience — formed Casa D'Angelo, Inc. D'Angelo's cousins ran Cunetto House of Pasta in St. Louis…
Fort Wayne
- 1977–1981The addition of 1981, and a new name
The addition: Construction of a major addition to the Main Library began in 1977; the Facilities Master Plan lists the addition's build year as 1979.
Fort Wayne
- 1977–todayCanterbury School
Founded: 1977, by the Rev. Dr. C. Corydon Randall, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, with leaders of the church.
Fort Wayne
- 1978The Blizzard of 1978
The first statewide Blizzard Warning in Indiana history was issued at 3:45 p.m. on 25 January 1978. The storm's central pressure fell to about 956 millibars over Michigan, and Fort Wayne recorded the lowest pressure in its history, 28.78 inches (975 mb).
Fort Wayne
- 1978The Blizzard of 1978
The storm Fort Wayne still measures winters against. The first statewide Blizzard Warning in Indiana history was issued at 3:45 p.m. on 25 January 1978.
Fort Wayne
- 1978The March 1978 flood
The blizzard winter's second act. Snowmelt put the Maumee at flood stage from 17 March to 2 April 1978, and Fort Wayne took its worst flood since 1913.
Fort Wayne
- 1978The Great Blizzard · January 1978
The Blizzard of 1978 is the storm Indiana still measures winters against, and Fort Wayne sat near the centre of it.
Fort Wayne
- 1978Deregulation and the regional-jet age
More airlines, smaller airplanes: The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 first showed at Fort Wayne as construction — the 1981 terminal modernization, jetways added "to handle increased traffic brought on by" the Act…
Fort Wayne
- 1978Fort Wayne Dance Collective
Founding: In the summer of 1978 five women — Cathy Craighead, Ranny Levy, Liz Monnier, Krista Schloss and Lisa Tsetse — met at a modern dance workshop sponsored by the Fort Wayne Women's Bureau, most accounts placing it at the Arts United Center, and decided to keep going.
Fort Wayne
- 1978Artlink
In the summer of 1978 Artlink opened at 1126 Broadway, founded by a group of young artists to promote awareness of emerging artists and art forms (its fortieth-anniversary release compresses the story to "founded in an apartment on Broadway" in August 1978).
Fort Wayne
- 1978The blizzard that bent the barometer
The pressure: The Blizzard of 1978 holds two of Fort Wayne's strangest weather distinctions at once. It was the storm of Indiana's first statewide Blizzard Warning in history, issued at 3:45 p.m. on 25 January 1978 — no such warning had ever covered the whole state before.
Fort Wayne
- 1978–todayThe weather eyes: instruments built here on every American weather satellite
L3Harris's own Indiana fact sheet states the record in one sentence: the company's technology has flown on every NOAA weather satellite in low-Earth orbit since 1978 and in geostationary orbit since 1994.
Fort Wayne
- 1978–todayThe weather instruments — Fort Wayne's eyes in orbit
L3Harris's own Indiana fact sheet states the span: the company's Fort Wayne technology "has been on every National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather satellite in low-Earth orbit since 1978 and in geostationary orbit since 1994."
Fort Wayne
- 1979A recording studio in a VW bus
One durable company of the next era began in the factory city's last decade: in 1979 Chuck Surack, a touring musician come home, started Sweetwater Sound as a four-track recording studio in the back of a Volkswagen bus, moving it into his house on Getz Road.
Fort Wayne
- 1979Sweetwater: the homegrown giant that never left
The largest dot-com win in this record was built on the city's own ground: Sweetwater began in 1979 as Chuck Surack's mobile recording studio in a Volkswagen bus — its full company history sits in the Business record…
Fort Wayne
- 1979Care of the smallest: Parkview's neonatal intensive care, 1979
Dr. William J. Lewis, a neonatologist, started Parkview's neonatal intensive care unit together with Dr. Donald Hoffman, and served as the unit's medical director from 1979 to 2005 — the dates stand in his published obituary in the Fort Wayne newspapers, the fullest account of the unit's founding.
Fort Wayne
- 1979Sweetwater: the studio that became an industry
Chuck Surack, a touring saxophonist who wanted off the road, founded the company in Fort Wayne in 1979, making location recordings of local bands with a TEAC four-track reel-to-reel in the back of his Volkswagen bus and mixing them down in his mobile home.
Fort Wayne
- 1979The Sweetwater session layer: a staff of producers
Chuck Surack, the founder, is a producer in his own right before he is a retailer: the company began in 1979 as his four-track recording studio, local musicians cut their first songs on the eight-track in his basement (the singer Doug Strahm's recollection, jingles included), and Surack carries a producer's credit on…
Fort Wayne
- 1979The Heritage Trail and the Blizzard Blazers of Hoagland
The Hoagland Blizzard Blazers Snowmobile Club tells its own history in two sentences on its website: "We were established in 1979 after the great blizzard of ‘78.
Fort Wayne
- 1979Glenbrook Dodge and the flag: eighteen employees to a landmark
The founding: Douglas McKibben opened Glenbrook Dodge in 1979 with eighteen employees, one building, and less than five acres of land.
Fort Wayne
- 1979–todayPetroleum Traders Corporation
Founded: 1979 (business start), Fort Wayne — stated as a company claim, with a distinct incorporation record flagged.
Fort Wayne
- 1979–todaySweetwater Sound
Founded: Chuck Surack founded Sweetwater in Fort Wayne in 1979. He had come off the road as a touring saxophonist and keyboard player and, in 1978, launched a mobile recording studio — a four-track Teac rig in the back of a Volkswagen bus.
Fort Wayne
- 1979–todayBeyond books: television, radio, reading services and maker labs
Reading service: The Audio Reading Service began in 1979 as the Northeast Indiana Radio Reading Service, reading newspapers and books aloud for blind and print-disabled listeners; it joined the library in 2004, took its present name in 2015, and reaches some 80,000 people.
Fort Wayne