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Awards and Honors: The National Ledger
Every city keeps an informal account of the honors its people have won, and the account tends to grow in the telling. This section keeps the account the strict way: an honor is entered here only when the body that gives it — the Nobel Foundation, the Pulitzer board, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Civic League — carries the name on its own roster, or when the recipient's authoritative record does. Honors held inside individual lives are profiled in the People sections and are not retold here; this is the ledger itself, honor by honor. It begins with the largest question, asked directly: whether any Nobel laureate has ever been Fort Wayne's. The honest answer is no, and the search that produced the answer is part of the record, so it is printed with the answer. Two of the ledger's lines are empty in the same way, and they are printed empty. One Fort Wayne honor claim, repeated in a published obituary, does not survive its roster check; it is printed as a claim, with the failure stated, because a ledger that only records successes is not a ledger.
The Nobel check: no laureate of Fort Wayne's
1901 — the present
No winner of a Nobel Prize, in any of the six categories, was born in Fort Wayne, raised in Fort Wayne, lived in Fort Wayne, or worked in Fort Wayne. The check was run three ways: the laureate rosters read by birthplace, the…
The laureate who came: Aung San Suu Kyi at the Coliseum
25 September 2012
Fort Wayne's one documented day with a Nobel laureate belongs to a visitor. Aung San Suu Kyi, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and spent most of the intervening two decades under house arrest in Burma, made Fort Wayne a…
A Pulitzer for the newspaper: the News-Sentinel and the flood
1983
The 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Local General or Spot News Reporting went to the Editorial Staff of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, in the Pulitzer board's citation, "for its courageous and resourceful coverage of a devastating flood in…
A Pulitzer for a Fort Wayne reporter: Charlie Savage
2007
The city's second Pulitzer line is a person's. Charlie Savage, a Fort Wayne native writing for the Boston Globe, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his 2006 series on presidential signing statements — the…
The Presidential Medal of Freedom: an empty line
1963 — the present
The Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, has never gone to a person born, raised, or based in Fort Wayne. The full recipients' roster was read for the city and the name does not appear; Indiana's…
A MacArthur Fellowship: John Henry Holland
1992
John Henry Holland, who built the study of genetic algorithms and complex adaptive systems at the University of Michigan, was born in Fort Wayne on 2 February 1929, the son of a Russian-Polish immigrant engineer, and was raised…
A Rhodes Scholarship: Raju Raval
c. 2000
Raju Raval was born in Fort Wayne to two naturalized citizens who had come from Gujarat, India, and went from the city to Indiana University, where he was a Herman B Wells Scholar, and then to two of the most selective…
A Rhodes claim that does not hold
1941 — 2016
One Fort Wayne Rhodes claim in print fails its check, and the ledger prints it as a claim. The published obituary of Sharon Adele Ruhl DesRosiers (1941–2016), born and raised in Fort Wayne, says she "attended Indiana University…
The National Inventors Hall of Fame: Philo Farnsworth
1984
Philo Taylor Farnsworth was not a Fort Wayne native — he was born in a log cabin at Beaver, Utah, in 1906, and transmitted his first electronic television image in San Francisco in 1927 — but the company that carried his name and…
The National Women's Hall of Fame: Alice Hamilton
1973
Alice Hamilton was born in New York City on 27 February 1869 and raised in Fort Wayne, on the three-block family estate her grandfather Allen Hamilton — who had settled here in 1823 — had built in the middle of the young city.…
The stage and screen awards: an Oscar nomination, an Emmy, a Tony, a Grammy
1936 — 2010
The entertainment awards divide the city's near-misses from its wins with unusual neatness. At the Academy Awards, no winner was born or raised in Fort Wayne; the city's closest approach is its most famous acting export. Carole…
The city's own: All-America City, four times over
1983 — 2021
The honors above belong to people. The National Civic League's All-America City Award belongs to the city itself, and Fort Wayne has won it four times — 1983, 1998, 2009 and 2021 — a count that puts it in the award's four-time…
State honors in brief: the Sagamore of the Wabash
The 1940s — 2024
Indiana's own highest civilian honor is the Sagamore of the Wabash, a gubernatorial award instituted under Governor Ralph Gates in the 1940s and given, governor by governor, ever since. No complete official roster of its…
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