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Famous People · The names the world knows, and what Fort Wayne can honestly claim
Every city record keeps two rolls. One is the full roll, every life the record can document, and Fort Wayne's runs to hundreds of names: mayors and machinists, painters and pastors, the famous and the forgotten standing in the same type. The other roll is shorter and harder to keep honest. It is the fame roll, the names a stranger in another country already knows, and the question it has to answer is not who they were but what this city can truthfully claim of them. Birth is a claim. A childhood is a claim. A first job, a hometown stage, a factory bought and run for a dozen years, those are claims. A name painted on the city itself is a claim of a different kind. This section prints the claims Fort Wayne can cite, at the size the evidence supports, and it prints its limits in the same type as its boasts: the general at its head never lived here, the novelist in its middle only passed part of a childhood here, and one inventor's birthplace is disputed between two of the most respectable institutions in the country, both of them named. What follows is the fame roll, kept honest.
Anthony Wayne: the namesake, who never lived here
1794
The claim, stated plainly: Fort Wayne is named for a man who spent a matter of weeks at the three rivers and never returned. Anthony Wayne (1745-1796), the Revolutionary War general the newspapers called Mad Anthony for his…
Johnny Appleseed: the folk hero who died here, and lies here
1774-1845
The man behind the legend: John Chapman was born on 26 September 1774 in Leominster, Massachusetts, and Fort Wayne makes no claim on his birth or his upbringing. The claim is the other end of the life, and it is one of the…
Edith Hamilton: the classicist Fort Wayne raised
1867-1963
The correction first: Edith Hamilton is often printed as a Fort Wayne native, and the record, kept carefully, says something more interesting. She was born on 12 August 1867 in Dresden, Germany, where her American parents…
Alice Hamilton: the first woman on Harvard's faculty, raised on the same estate
1869-1970
The second sister: Alice Hamilton was born on 27 February 1869 in New York City, the second of Montgomery and Gertrude Hamilton's daughters, and like Edith she was raised in Fort Wayne, in the sheltered, book-filled world of the…
Carole Lombard: 704 Rockhill Street to the top of Hollywood
1908-1942
The birth: She was born Jane Alice Peters on 6 October 1908, at 704 Rockhill Street in Fort Wayne, the third child and only daughter of Frederic Christian Peters and Elizabeth Jayne Knight Peters, a prosperous family of the…
Marion Donovan: the diaper inventor, and a birthplace two institutions dispute
1917-1998
The dispute, printed first: Marion O'Brien Donovan was born on 15 October 1917, and this section cannot tell you where, because the institutions that know her best do not agree. The National Inventors Hall of Fame, which inducted…
Bill Blass: the dressmaker's son who dressed America
1922-2002
The Fort Wayne start: William Ralph Blass was born on 22 June 1922 in Fort Wayne, the son of Ralph Aldrich Blass, a traveling hardware salesman, and Ethyl Keyser Blass, who made dresses. His father died when Bill was five, and…
Philo Farnsworth: television's inventor, and Fort Wayne's factory
1939-1967 in Fort Wayne
The correction first: Philo Farnsworth is sometimes folded into Fort Wayne's General Electric story, and that is a different company's thread (it runs through this section in the stub for Bruce Nauman, whose father was the GE…
James Clapper: the intelligence chief born here
born 1941
The claim: James Robert Clapper Jr. was born on 14 March 1941 in Fort Wayne, the son of an Army signals intelligence officer, First Lieutenant James Robert Clapper, whose trade the son inherited. A military family does not stay…
E. Jean Carroll: raised on Illsley Place
born 1943, raised in Fort Wayne
The claim: Elizabeth Jean Carroll was born on 12 December 1943 in Detroit, Michigan, and raised in Fort Wayne, the oldest of four children on Illsley Place, in a house where, by her own telling, the magazines arrived in stacks.…
Dave Thomas: formed at the Hobby House
1947, the Fort Wayne years
The claim, at full size: Dave Thomas was born Rex David Thomas on 2 July 1932 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, adopted at six weeks, and raised in a family that moved wherever work was. Wendy's was founded in Columbus, Ohio. But the…
Shelley Long: Diane Chambers, from Indian Village
born 1949
The claim: Shelley Lee Long was born on 23 August 1949 in Indian Village, Fort Wayne, the only child of Leland and Ivadine Long, both of them teachers, her father a rubber industry man turned teacher. She was raised in Fort Wayne…
Stephen King: a childhood sojourn, printed as exactly that
about 1949 into the 1950s, bracketed
The claim, and its limit: This is the thinnest claim in the leg, and it is printed thin, on purpose, because the name is the biggest on the page. Stephen King was born on 21 September 1947 in Portland, Maine. He was not born in…
Jenna Fischer: born here, Pam Beesly to the world
born 1974
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. That sentence is the whole of the Fort Wayne claim, and…
Charlie Savage: the Pulitzer winner from the Journal Gazette's newsroom
born 1975
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. The Allen County Public Library's own account…
Heather Headley: Trinidad to Northrop to a Tony Award
1989, the Fort Wayne years
The claim: Heather Headley was born on 5 October 1974 in Barataria, Trinidad, and her Fort Wayne claim is the formation kind, the strongest kind this section recognizes after birth. In 1989, when she was fifteen, her father, a…
The cross-references: carried at full size elsewhere in this record
Stubs, by design
Bruce Nauman (born 1941): Born 6 December 1941 in Fort Wayne, the son of a General Electric engineer, in a family the company moved often. He became one of the most influential artists of the last half century, honoured with the…
