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1979 — present
The founding: Douglas McKibben opened Glenbrook Dodge in 1979 with eighteen employees, one building, and less than five acres of land. Dodge was the whole of it at the start. The house's own account measures the growth in the same plain units: over one hundred employees, five buildings, and just under eight acres, at 100 W. Coliseum Blvd., the brand set grown from Dodge alone to Dodge, Chrysler, Jeep and Ram, and the single store grown into an automotive group across Northeast Indiana and Northwest Ohio.
The flag: For the dealership's twentieth anniversary in 1999, McKibben had the idea of flying one massive flag. After much planning, many setbacks, and actual construction — the house's own telling keeps all three — the flag went up on 13 October 2001: fifty feet by eighty feet of flag, raised 232 feet into the Fort Wayne skyline. It made the dealership a landmark in the practical sense, the reference point of the whole Coliseum Boulevard corridor; the store's own people navigate customers to it "under the giant flag" to this day. Few dealerships anywhere are findable by a monument, and none in this record but this one.
Sources:
- The house's own About page (the 1979 opening and the employee, building and acreage figures; the flag's planning and raising, 13 October 2001).