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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, who held the post to 1956 and travelled to Chicago stores to study their work; local memory rated the magic windows the equal of Macy's. The store's animatronic figures were children's entertainment before the phrase existed: a trip downtown to see the windows was the season's first event, free at the price of a sidewalk crowd.
The wreath and the Santa: In 1937 the store hung the giant Merry Christmas Wreath on its Calhoun Street building, 25 feet high with a reported 40,000 lights, one of the large custom displays owner G. Irving Latz sketched himself and Brinkman Signs built; the Journal Gazette credits Brinkman's artist Isabel Wilkinson Parker with the Santa design, worked from a Christmas scene Latz handed her. The Santa display itself is bracketed by the sources: designed with the 1937 displays in the store's tradition, and first lit, by the genealogical society's History Journal account, on 20 November 1940, when Mayor Harry Baals turned it on, with three pairs of reindeer at first and a fourth pair added later. The display ran every Christmas from 1940 to 1958, except the blackout years 1942, 1943 and 1944, when a war-production city kept its lights down; one modern account carries the run to 1959, the year the company relocated, and the last W&D year stands bracketed at [1958/1959].
The loss and the resurrection: Then, for twenty years, the displays disappeared into a warehouse. In the spring of 1979 Jim Green, a GTE phone installer, found Santa and his reindeer stashed away; trade unions, the Chamber of Commerce and scores of citizens donated the labor and money to restore them, 200 hours of work before a single reindeer lit again on the Fort Wayne National Bank building. Two restored reindeer showed on a parking garage that first Christmas, and by Thanksgiving eve of 1980 the whole Santa stood restored: 155 feet long, 24,717 bulbs, five and a half tons. He has flown every year since, the anchor of downtown's Night of Lights on Thanksgiving eve, which now draws tens of thousands; the wreath hangs on the Indiana Michigan Power Center. The store is gone, but its Christmas present to the city's children outlived it by two generations and counting. The Winter WanDerland figures survive too, more than thirty animatronic pieces kept by the History Center.
Sources:
- Barron and Barron, Wolf & Dessauer: Where Fort Wayne Shopped (The History Press, 2011), as carried in Wikipedia's Wolf & Dessauer article and the Waymarking display history (the 1928 windows, Bixby, the 1937 wreath, the Brinkman build and the Parker credit).
- Allen County Genealogical Society, Wolf & Dessauer page and History Journal (the 20 November 1940 first lighting; the 1940-1958 run and the blackout years; the Green obituary account).
- Input Fort Wayne, "A Timeless Glow," November 2025 (the 1979 finding, the restoration labor, the 1980 comeback at 155 feet and 24,717 bulbs, Night of Lights today).