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Kids & Family Entertainment · Where Fort Wayne took its children
Before Fort Wayne had attractions, it had an argument: that children needed somewhere safe and supervised to play, and that providing it was a public duty. The argument was won by clubwomen with a six-acre playground in 1911, and everything in this section descends from it in one of two lines. The first line is civic: the playgrounds, the park board's day camp, the Y camp in the lake country, the children's theatre, the library's storytimes, and the two great indoor rooms the city built its families in the 1980s and 1990s, the Conservatory and Science Central. The second line is commercial and seasonal: the rink the Wall family built by hand in 1950, the drive-ins, the animatronic mouse of 1982, the putt-putt fun center, and the two fixtures that still organize the family calendar, the Appleseed weekend in September and the Santa lighting on Thanksgiving eve. Neither line ever fully displaced the other, which is the pattern this section keeps finding: in Fort Wayne, family entertainment was built as often by donation and ordinance as by ticket price, and the donated kind has lasted longest.
The first playground: the clubwomen's six acres
1908-1923
The board: Organized family play in Fort Wayne begins with government. In 1905, under the state's Cities and Towns Law, Mayor Henry C. Berghoff appointed the first Board of Park Commissioners, and the board's early work ran…
Camp Potawotami: the Y's lake in the woods
1920-
The founding: The YMCA of Greater Fort Wayne's resident camp dates itself to 1920, and a century of Fort Wayne children have been bused the roughly forty miles north to it: Camp Potawotami, on the shores of Blackman Lake in…
Fort Wayne Youtheatre: forty students, one dollar, seventy-five actors
1934-
The founding, two ways: The Youtheatre's house history gives its 1934 founding to a committee: Dr. Clive McAllister, president of the Old Fort Players (now the Civic Theatre), appointed one to create a junior or children's…
The Santa over Calhoun Street: Wolf & Dessauer's gift to December
1928-1959, and 1979-
The windows: Fort Wayne's Christmas entertainment industry began as retail theatre. From 1928 the Wolf & Dessauer department store dressed animated holiday windows, the Winter WanDerland displays, under display chief Allen Bixby…
The drive-ins: the family car as a theatre seat
1939-1987
The first screen under the sky: Cinema Treasures' Fort Wayne record, which is comment-grade and warns in its own text that its listings may have to be split, gives the city a drive-in at the very start of the form: a theatre…
Franke Park: the day camp in the biscuit man's woods
1921-1949
The gift: In 1921 John B. Franke, president of the Perfection Biscuit Company, donated 80 acres to establish the park that bears his name, the largest gift of play space in the city's history; the 80 acres have grown to about…
The Roller Dome: a thousand kids a day
1950-2015
The building: The Roller Dome was built in 1950 by Jim and Marjorie Wall, by hand in the plain sense: Jim Wall, a World War II veteran and a skilled carpenter, built the rink from the ground up with his father Joe, on what had…
Three Rivers Festival: the children's parade and the 527-foot hot dog
1969-2025
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…
The Johnny Appleseed Festival: history a child can eat
1974-
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…
ShowBiz Pizza: the Rock-afire years, and the mouse who replaced them
1982-1992, and after
The opening, at the record's grade: Fort Wayne's animatronic decade is fixed by fan-maintained sources, and this section prints it at exactly that grade: the Chuck E. Cheese locations record lists Fort Wayne, 711 Coliseum…
The Botanical Conservatory: winter, abolished for an afternoon
1983-
The two friends: The Foellinger-Freimann Botanical Conservatory began, in the city's own telling, as an idea between two friends who wanted Fort Wayne to have an indoor sanctuary: Helene Foellinger, publisher of the…
The Festival of Trees: the Embassy at Christmas
1984-
The founding bracket: The Embassy Theatre dates its Festival of Trees to 1984, and its own 2014 history of the festival explains the arithmetic: in 1984 Maryellen Rice, a member of the theatre's board, asked her neighbor Barb…
Putt-Putt: the fun center, assembled piece by piece
Opening unfixed; the build-out, 1980s-1995
The bracket: The Fort Wayne Putt-Putt Fun Center, at 4530 Speedway Drive in the Coliseum Boulevard corridor across from Glenbrook, is the leg's honest dating problem. A ratings directory dates the center "since 1976," and no…
Science Central: the power plant that became a playground
1987-1995, and after
The incorporation: Science Central was incorporated as a nonprofit in 1987 by a group of teachers, parents, engineers and community leaders who wanted a science discovery center for the children of northeast Indiana, working at…
Fantasy of Lights: Franke Park by car, at Christmas
[1995]-
The start, fixed by counting: No founding announcement for the Fantasy of Lights was found; its first season is fixed by the event's own season counts, which are consistent: the Waynedale News called 2021 the event's 27th year…
The library's children's rooms: the quiet entertainment
The long storytime tradition; StoryScape, 2022
The standing offer: The Allen County Public Library runs the largest children's entertainment system in this section, and it does not look like one: fourteen branches across the county, over a million visitors a year, and in the…
The zoo: a cross-reference, by design
1965-
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. It stands at full size in THE ZOO, its own leg of this record, which owns its history entire. This entry exists so that no reader of the family entertainment record mistakes the omission for an oversight: the zoo is the one attraction in Fort Wayne that needed no backfill, because it was never missing.
Sources:
- Fort Wayne Board of Park Commissioners, Franke Park showcase paper, March 2022 (the 1952 Shoaff donation; the sanctuary; the zoo's official opening in 1965).
- THE ZOO, this record (the zoo at full size).
The pattern: two lines, one calendar
1908-today
The civic line: Read in sequence, Fort Wayne's family entertainment divides into two lines that never stopped running side by side. The civic line opens with supervised play: Snively's playground of 1908, Guldlin's six acres of…
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