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Fort Wayne television pioneer — The Ann Colone Show
On the record
Ann L. Colone was born in Fort Wayne on June 11, 1930, the daughter of Italian-American grocers, and spent her whole career in her hometown's media. She started at WGL radio as a secretary and became the station's first woman disc jockey. In 1958 she joined the staff of WANE-TV (the station had signed on September 26, 1954 as WINT at Waterloo and taken the WANE-TV call letters when it moved to Fort Wayne in 1956) — the station's history in the main people section names her show — and for some eighteen years she hosted The Ann Colone Show, a daily talk program that made her a fixture of Fort Wayne life. Her guests ranged from Lucille Ball, Bob Hope, and Robert F. Kennedy to Walter Cronkite, Count Basie, and the Rolling Stones in their earliest days. She served as the station's women's director and remained at WANE until 1981; years later WFWA, the city's PBS station, brought her career back to the screen in the retrospective Ann Colone Remembers. She died on June 12, 2007, the day after her seventy-seventh birthday. Colone's fame was Fort Wayne's own rather than national, and the record of her career rests largely on her obituary; she stands here because no history of Fort Wayne broadcasting is complete without her.
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- § 06 — people of the record · famous-people supplement
Sources: World Biographical Encyclopedia (Prabook) entry, drawn from the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette obituary record, June 2007.