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1921–2019
The Embassy rescue: The Embassy Theatre was saved in 1974 by a campaign whose documented anchor gift was Robert Goldstine's 250,000 dollar challenge gift — the largest single gift of the rescue and, for the cultural category, the benchmark of its era: a quarter of a million dollars when that was the price of saving a palace. The theatre's full record is in the Heritage and Arts sections. No later Fort Wayne cultural rescue documents a larger single gift; the category's subsequent history is campaigns, not patrons.
The art museum's two bookends: The Fort Wayne Museum of Art begins with a gift: in 1921 Theodore Thieme gave 10,000 dollars in cash, his art collection of ten paintings, and his house at 1026 West Berry Street to establish the Fort Wayne Art School and Museum — a founding gift modest in dollars and total in effect. Ninety-eight years later the museum received a 1 million dollar bequest from the estate of June Enoch, a retired Manchester University associate professor who died in 2017, establishing the June E. Enoch Collection Fund in 2019 — the largest single documented gift in the museum's record, and a professor's lifetime accumulation doing for the museum what Thieme's industrial fortune had done at its founding.
The Zoo and the History Center, as the record stands: The Fort Wayne Zoo's documented pattern is the broad campaign: its Australian Adventure renovation, a 7 million dollar project built in three phases across 2013–15, was funded entirely by donated money from individuals, foundations and businesses, with no single signature gift in the record reached; named pieces, such as the Gary Probst Family's sponsorship of Stingray Bay, are documented without published amounts. The History Center likewise shows no single major gift in the record reached — its home in the old City Hall is the city's own, and its support runs through the county historical society's membership and program pattern. Both entries print the record as found: in a section about the largest gifts, the absence of one is also a fact, and it distinguishes the institutions a patron built from the institutions everybody maintains.
Sources:
- Arts United and Embassy Theatre records, as compiled in the Arts and Nonprofits legs of this history — the Goldstine challenge gift.
- Fort Wayne Museum of Art records — the Thieme founding gift of 1921; Indianapolis Business Journal's table of major Indiana gifts (2019) — the Enoch bequest.
- Fort Wayne Zoo releases (2013–2015) — the Australian Adventure funding; the Probst sponsorship.