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Founder of Sweetwater
On the record
Chuck Surack was born in Waverly, Ohio, and his family moved to Fort Wayne while he was a boy; he attended Wayne High School and played saxophone. After touring as a professional musician, he returned to Fort Wayne in 1979 and founded Sweetwater as a four-track recording studio in the back of a Volkswagen bus, later working from houses on Getz Road and Bass Road. In 1985 his programming work on the Kurzweil K250 synthesizer made him a sought-after sound designer, and the studio grew into a retailer. Sweetwater became the largest online music retailer in the United States and passed a billion dollars in annual revenue in 2020. Surack remains the company's founder and chairman — John Hopkins became chief executive in July 2021 — and his Surack Enterprises also owns Fort Wayne businesses including SweetCars, Sweet Aviation, The Clyde Theatre, and Longe Optical. No birth date for Surack appears in the reliable published record, and none is given here.
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- § 06 — people of the record · famous-people supplement
Sources: Indiana University (honors biography of Surack); Sweetwater (published company history).