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Mayor of Fort Wayne
On the record
Three terms; the Headwaters Park era.
Three terms spanning the Headwaters Park era — the flood-control project that remade the old “Thumb” between the rivers as the city’s festival ground was dedicated in 1993, during his administration.
Walter Paul Helmke Jr. was born 24 November 1948 in Bloomington, Indiana, and raised in Fort Wayne, where he graduated from North Side High School; politics ran in the family — his father Walter P. Helmke was a state senator and county prosecutor, and his grandfather Walter E. Helmke had been Allen County prosecutor and Republican county chairman. Helmke graduated with highest distinction from Indiana University in 1970 and took his law degree at Yale in 1973, then practiced law in Fort Wayne for more than fourteen years. In 1987 he upset the two-term incumbent, Winfield C. Moses Jr., and went on to win re-election in 1991 and 1995; in his final term he served as president of the United States Conference of Mayors. In 1998 he won the Republican nomination for the United States Senate and lost the general election to former governor Evan Bayh. He did not seek a fourth term as mayor in 1999 and remains, as of this writing, the last Republican to hold the office.
After city hall he co-wrote Son of a Son of a Politician (2001), a memoir of three generations in politics. In July 2006 he became president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington, serving until July 2011. In January 2013 he joined Indiana University's O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs as a professor of practice and founding director of its Civic Leaders Living-Learning Center.
Find them on this page
- § 04 — the mayoral roster
Roster cross-checked between the City of Fort Wayne’s official mayors page and the full dated list — sources printed under the roster in § 04; Wikipedia, "Paul Helmke"; Indiana University O'Neill School faculty profile.