Gabriel DeLobbe: the saboteur who taught Fort Wayne to see

c. 1925 — 2025

From the Ardennes to the Fine Arts Center: Gabriel DeLobbe was born in Charleroi, Belgium, in the mid-1920s — he was fourteen when Germany invaded in 1940 — and by eighteen he was a saboteur in the Belgian resistance, blowing up German supply routes and protecting downed Allied airmen in the Ardennes. After liberation he was regularized into the United States Army, marched into Germany, fought at the Remagen bridgehead, and helped liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the war he settled in Fort Wayne, and the second half of his life was spent behind a camera. His as-built photographs of Louis I. Kahn's Fort Wayne Fine Arts Center and Performing Arts Theater, made about 1973, are held by the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania in the Kahn and Marshall Meyers collections — a Fort Wayne building of world standing, documented by a Fort Wayne photographer, his prints filed in Philadelphia beside the architect's own papers. He was the photographer for the Purdue-Indiana Theatre (a program credit of the 1967–68 season survives in Purdue Fort Wayne's digital collections), stood on the Fort Wayne Art Institute's faculty for its 1975 faculty exhibition, and won an Addy Award in 1973 for advertising photography; the History Center, where he volunteered for years, gave him its Chapman Award as Volunteer of the Year in 2002.

His largest legacy was two students. DeLobbe mentored David and Peter Turnley — the twin brothers of the next entry — at a summer photography workshop when they were seventeen, an influence David Turnley has written about for the rest of his career. DeLobbe's granddaughter Nicole Lehrman told his war in the documentary Saboteur (2017), broadcast on WIPB-TV in November 2018 and nominated for a Central Great Lakes regional Emmy. He died in January 2025, in his late nineties; David Turnley's public tribute to him, published on 7 January 2025, called him "a world class man" and "my surrogate father, and a dear friend and mentor."

Sources:

1. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana, D-surnames biographical page — Gabriel DeLobbe, including Allison Sloboda, "War documentary made by granddaughter airing on TV Thursday," Journal Gazette, 7 November 2018, on the film Saboteur; Ball State University, TCOM Saboteur page.
2. University of Pennsylvania, Architectural Archives — Louis I. Kahn Collection and Marshall D. Meyers Collection finding aids: as-built photographs of the Fort Wayne Fine Arts Center and Performing Arts Theater, ca. 1973, credited to Gabriel DeLobbe.
3. Purdue Fort Wayne digital collections, Indiana Memory — Purdue-Indiana Theatre program, 1967–68 season (DeLobbe, photographer).
4. The History Center — DeLobbe family donation records: the 1973 Addy Award certificate, the 1975 Fort Wayne Art Institute faculty exhibition poster, and the Chapman Award, Volunteer of the Year 2002; David Turnley, tribute to Gabriel DeLobbe, 7 January 2025.