Fort Wayne, Indiana · 20th century
1950s
64 dated events in 1950s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
20th century 64 dated mentions
1950s
- 1950The south side post · VFW Fort Miami Post 10006
The city's own record puts the post's beginning in 1950: the Plan Commission digest for a 2025 rezoning case describes the site as "historically home to the Fort Miami Post No 10006, that had been in existence since 1950."
- 1950The coal indictments: a mayor, a police chief, and fifty-two charges that never reached a verdict
The indictments: On 10 November 1950 a grand jury indicted Democratic Mayor Henry E. Branning, Police Chief Lester Eisenhut, Councilman Charles Boyer, Traffic Captain Gregor Klug, City Utilities purchasing agent Harold Battenberg and coal company president A. Eugene Martin…
- 1950The drive-ins, II: East 30, Hillcrest, Lincolndale, and the end of the outdoor era
Three more screens under the sky: The East 30 Drive-In, at 7500 SR-930 East on the old U.S. 30 toward New Haven, opened on October 6, 1950, with Randolph Scott in The Nevadan…
- 1950–1968Frank M. Freimann — the chief who came with Magnavox
He came with the headquarters to Fort Wayne as executive vice president and served as president and chief executive from 1950 until his death in 1968 — one reference's body text says "died in 1967 in Manhattan," against its own header dates and the obituary record, and 1968 stands here.
- 1950–2001The tornadoes that struck the city
The Weather Service's Northern Indiana office keeps the city's tornado list, and its ceiling is low: no tornado stronger than F2 has ever been recorded inside Fort Wayne.
- 1950–2015The Roller Dome: a thousand kids a day
The building: The Roller Dome was built in 1950 by Jim and Marjorie Wall, by hand in the plain sense: Jim Wall, a World War II veteran and a skilled carpenter, built the rink from the ground up with his father Joe, on what had been an apple orchard at 444 West Coliseum Boulevard, then California Road, at the edge of a…
- 1950–2024Tornadoes · the county roster
The Storm Prediction Center's record, as the county trackers compile it, counts 32 tornadoes in Allen County from 1950 to 2024 .
- 1951Edward A. and Joan White — Bowmar's founding household
In 1951 Edward A. White — a graduate engineer, twenty-four years old in 1952, formerly head of Farnsworth Television's electromechanical section and before that a Harvard research assistant, then employed by the Farnsworth-Capehart company in Fort Wayne…
- 1951South Anthony Speedway: the little track
In 1951 Mason and Robert McCulloch and Ray Walter built a speedway on the Harber family farm along South Anthony Boulevard — Carl Harber Jr., whose father owned the farm, is the record's witness — a 3/8-mile oval, dirt for its first season and then paved and slightly enlarged, lighted, and racing two nights a week, Tuesdays and Saturdays.
- 1951The Clyde: one room, two music lives
Movie palace to concert hall: The Quimby family's second great Fort Wayne room opened on April 19, 1951, at 1808 Bluffton Road in Quimby Village: the Clyde Theatre, designed by A. M. Strauss — the Emboyd's architect — commissioned by the family of Clyde Quimby, the operator who had opened the Emboyd in 1928.
- 1951The Clyde Theatre: the Quimby memorial and the region's premier movie house
The movie decades: The Clyde opened on April 19, 1951, and took its place at once as the region's premier movie house, drawing patrons from across northeast Indiana and northwest Ohio to Quimby Village for first-run pictures.
- 1951–2020The school fight · concentration, boycott, settlement
The board defended the lines: in 1951 it refused to let two Black basketball players transfer from Central to North Side.
- 1951–todayBowmar Instrument Corporation (later Bowmar LLC)
Founded: 1951, Fort Wayne. Purdue MEP's company history, the ACGSI places account, Hawfield and the Seventh Circuit's findings in Dixon v.
- 1951–todayMagnavox's defense company — and its Raytheon heir
The division's own historians closed its forty-year account (1951–1991) with annual sales above $650 million and more than 7,000 Fort Wayne employees across its legacy — the figures are the company's history's, printed as such.
- 1952The Coliseum
The Allen County War Memorial Coliseum was dedicated on 28 September 1952 before 10,000 people and delegations from twenty-four veterans' organizations — the county's memorial to its war dead, built as an arena.
- 1952The big room: landmark concerts at the Memorial Coliseum
The arena years: The Allen County War Memorial Coliseum — dedicated September 28, 1952, as the county's memorial to its war dead, a history carried in the War Heroes and Famous Locations records — was for half a century the biggest indoor stage between Chicago and the Ohio line, and the touring music business used it that way.
- 1952Kevin Wall: Live 8, Live Earth, and the first internet Emmy
The Embassy's kid: Kevin Wall was born in Fort Wayne in March 1952 — most published biographies give the day as the 15th; an Indiana Music Makers profile gives the 5th, and the difference stands in the record unresolved.
- 1952Kelley: the pilot who became a Dodge dealer in ninety days
The date the group has always kept is 21 August 1952 — kept the more easily because it was also the day Jim's son Tom was born.
- 1952–1965The Menagerie Before the Zoo: The Sanctuary Years, 1952–1965
The limit of the record: No earlier municipal zoo or menagerie in Fort Wayne stands in the record reached for this history — the park histories, the parks department's chronologies, and the zoo's own published history all begin the city's animal-keeping with the 1952 sanctuary.
- 1952–2026The women of the posts
At the Indiana VFW's 31st annual encampment in Indianapolis in June 1952, Mrs. Addie Wilkerson of Fort Wayne was elected president of the Ladies Auxiliary's state department.
- 1952–todayThe Komets whole, 1952–today
The Komets were born of the new Allen County War Memorial Coliseum , dedicated in 1952, and of Ernie Berg , the club's founder and first general manager.
- 1952–todayThe Komets, 1952–today
Ernie Berg founded the club in 1952 — the K, the story goes, honoured his wife Kathryn, and he modeled the team on the Toledo Mercurys — and the Fort Wayne Komets played their first game on 25 October 1952, a 4–0 loss to Toledo, at the brand-new Allen County War Memorial Coliseum.
- 1952–todayK&K Insurance Group, Inc.
Founded: 1952, Fort Wayne. The company's own history (in both its current Aon-hosted About page and its older Company History page) dates its origin to 1952, when its founders "began managing and marketing a benevolent fund to provide accident medical benefits to injured race car drivers."
- 1952–todayDale Enochs: the native who carves limestone
The start: Dale Enochs, born in 1952, is a native of Fort Wayne, and his art began, as Davisson's teaching line would predict, at home and at the city's school: he remembers wanting to be an artist at five, painting at his grandmother's house, where she made small Victorian paintings of her own.
- 1953The Coliseum indoors: where USAC began
Midgets on the hockey rink: In January 1953, months after the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum opened, indoor auto racing began on a converted hockey rink inside the arena — a cement oval given in the drivers' records as a tenth of a mile.
- 1953The home drivers: Bullet Bobby and the Coes
Bob Coe took to the South Anthony Speedway in 1953 in a 1937 Ford and became, in his family's record, one of the best drivers of his time at the local tracks, known as "Bullet Bobby" Coe.
- 1953Parkview Memorial and the Randallia campus, 1953
Ground was broken on 12 August 1951, and on 8 November 1953 the $3 million Parkview Memorial Hospital was dedicated; the patients moved in from Lewis Street on 21 November 1953.
- 1953–1957George Yardley: the Piston who carried Fort Wayne to two Finals
George Harry Yardley III (3 November 1928 - 12 August 2004) was a Stanford forward from Hollywood, California, whom the Fort Wayne Pistons drafted in 1950 and signed in 1953, after he kept his amateur standing for a run at the 1952 Olympics.
- 1953–todayWKJG-TV → WISE-TV (channel 33)
Founded: 21 November 1953, Fort Wayne. The History Center's WANE-TV videotape collection description, the station histories and the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame biography of Hilliard Gates all agree: WKJG-TV began broadcasting 21 November 1953 , Fort Wayne's first television station , as an NBC affiliate on UHF channel 33.
- 1954Jack Molinas and the Pistons gambling case · 1954
When the pattern of telephone calls surfaced, owner Fred Zollner suspended his rookie in January 1954; the NBA banned Molinas for life, the first such ban in league history.
- 1954WANE-TV (channel 15) — founded as WINT, Waterloo
Founded: 26 September 1954, as WINT.
- 1954Parker Place: the modern campus, the long decline, and the closure
By the 1950s the East State buildings were dilapidated and badly overcrowded, and in 1954 the state decided to move the institution to Parker Place Farm, one of the farms the school owned, at St. Joe and Stellhorn roads.
- 1954The Berry Street vanguard: Oettel, Fishman, and the golden era
Oettel: Russell Oettel landed at the Fort Wayne Art School in 1954, and stayed to run it.
- 1955The vaccine close · 1955
On April 12, 1955, at Ann Arbor, Dr. Thomas Francis announced the verdict of the largest field trial in medical history: the vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk was "safe, effective and potent," and it was licensed the same day.
- 1955Arts United of Greater Fort Wayne
Founding: Arts United was established in 1955 as the Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation. Its first member organizations were the Fort Wayne Art School and Museum, the Fort Wayne Civic Theatre, and the Fort Wayne Musical Society — an exact map of the city's established arts in that year.
- 1955Southgate Plaza: the first plaza
The form arrived in full in 1955, when Southgate Plaza opened at Pettit Avenue and Calhoun Street on the south side: forty stores on forty acres, in the News-Sentinel's millennium-history summary, "with plenty of easy parking."
- 1955The umbrella: Arts United of Greater Fort Wayne
Founding: In 1955 a circle of civic leaders — Arts United's own retelling, through its president Susan Mendenhall, places the talks in the tea room of the Wolf and Dessauer department store — formed the Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation, today Arts United of Greater Fort Wayne.
- 1955David and Peter Turnley: McClellan Street
The most decorated photographers Fort Wayne ever produced started on one downtown street: David C. Turnley and Peter N. Turnley, twin brothers, were born in Fort Wayne on 22 June 1955, sons of Dr. William Loyd Turnley, an orthodontist, and Elizabeth Ann (Protsman) Turnley, and grew up on McClellan Street in downtown…
- 19557 February 1955: the crew of American Airlines Flight 266
At 7:55 p.m. on 7 February 1955, the flight crew of American Airlines Flight 266, over Fort Wayne, reported star-like objects hanging stationary due north of the aircraft at an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 feet, which then departed at a speed the crew described as terrific.
- 1955–1988The union of the arts: the Fine Arts Foundation, 1955
The founding: In 1955 Fort Wayne's arts organisations did the thing this section exists to record. The Fort Wayne Art School and Museum, the Fort Wayne Civic Theatre and the Fort Wayne Musical Society founded the Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation, with Sam Rea of Rea Magnet Wire as its first board chairman.
- 1956The general-aviation layer: Chapter 2, the schools, and the fight to keep Smith Field
The field settled into the general-aviation life it still leads, and its institutions accumulated: EAA Chapter 2, chartered at Fort Wayne in 1956 — the second chapter of the Experimental Aircraft Association in the world, by its number…
- 1956Eugene E. Parker — the Fort Wayne agent who ran football from here
Born and raised in Fort Wayne: Eugene E. Parker was born in Fort Wayne on 24 February 1956 and starred where he grew up.
- 1956St. Vincent de Paul Catholic School
The opening: The school's own strategic plan tells the first day plainly: on September 4, 1956, St. Vincent de Paul opened its first four classrooms for grades one through four, with one hundred sixty students, three Adrian Dominican nuns and one lay teacher.
- 1956Fort Wayne Ballet
Founding: In the mid-1950s, with the city thriving as an industrial hub, a group of residents decided a proper metropolis needed a ballet academy, organized and raised the money, and in 1956 filed articles of incorporation…
- 1956The returns II: eagle, turkey, and the downtown falcons
Restoration ran from 1956 to 2004: the DNR counts 2,795 wild-trapped turkeys released at 185 sites around the state.
- 1956–1978The dance floor: the Ballet and the Collective
The Ballet: Fort Wayne Ballet presents itself, in its own published profiles, as Indiana's oldest professional ballet company, founded in 1956.
- 1957Northcrest Shopping Center: the north side answers
A center built with a neighborhood: Northcrest was not planted in front of houses that already stood; it was erected, in 1957, alongside the houses themselves.
- 19577 August 1957: the meteorologist's four-hour light
The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette of Saturday morning, 10 August 1957, ran the story under the headline "Pinpointing the Mystery," with a photograph of Don Semancik, meteorologist at the Fort Wayne Weather Bureau, pointing out where the "star" he saw Wednesday morning had appeared in relation to the horizon.
- 1957–1962Darl Parker and the Lincoln National robbery · the road to Alcatraz
The robbery: on Friday, October 18, 1957, Darl Lee Parker — the name is spelled Darl Dee Parker in the caption of his federal appeal, and Daryl Lee Parker in the Alcatraz literature — and John T. Bartholomew robbed the Clinton and Rudisill branch of the Lincoln National Bank and Trust Company of Fort Wayne of $50,104.
- 1957–1969Len Thornson: the Wayne Gretzky of the IHL, for twelve winters
Len Thornson (4 February 1933 - 12 December 2021) was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, arrived in Fort Wayne in 1957, and then did not leave the middle of the Komets' lineup for twelve consecutive seasons.
- 1957–1977Concordia Senior College
Founded: The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod authorized a senior college in 1951 to complete its pre-seminary course, and Concordia Senior College opened in 1957 on a 191-acre campus in north Fort Wayne designed by Eero Saarinen…
- 1957–todayWPTA (channel 21) — "21 Alive"
Founded: 28 September 1957, Fort Wayne (licensed to Roanoke).
- 1958The Foellinger Foundation: the grantmaking machine
The machine: Helene Foellinger and her mother Esther created the Foellinger Foundation in 1958, funded by Helene's lifetime gifts, both women's estates, and contributions from the News Publishing Company until The News-Sentinel was sold in 1980 (the fortune and the family are in the Wealth section).
- 1958The Foellinger bequest: a newspaper fortune becomes the city's foundation
The Foellinger Foundation was created in 1958 by Helene Foellinger and her mother Esther A. Foellinger, and it was built the way family foundations of that era were built: the founders gave during their lives — Helene gave substantially to the foundation across her lifetime…
- 1958–1975The festival that taught the city to gather: Franke Park, 1958
The first Fine Arts Festival was held on 17 May 1958 at Franke Park, originated and chaired by Margaret Ann Keegan, the public servant whose name Arts United now gives to its arts education award.
- 1958–todayBishop Luers High School
Founded: Luers opened in 1958 at 333 East Paulding Road, the south-side and first-completed half of Bishop Leo Pursley's campaign to relieve Central Catholic, which held more than 1,400 students by 1956.
- 1959The bowling and equipment men — Carteaux, Schmidt and Brown
Two Fort Wayne manufacturers began in the trades they served: Bob Carteaux and Marty Schmidt started Classic Products in 1959 as Fort Wayne Bowling Supply, in the Key Lanes pro shop, and built it into the bowling industry's catalogue house.
- 1959Ed Viesturs — born here, raised in Rockford, first American up all fourteen
The tie, stated precisely: Ed Viesturs was born in Fort Wayne on 22 June 1959 and raised in Rockford, Illinois.
- 1959The long-lived bars: Henry's, the Brass Rail, the Green Frog
Henry's: The best-documented of the postwar rooms is Henry's at 536 West Main Street, family owned and operated since 1959 by the Freistroffer family — the brothers John and Hank Freistroffer, who also ran Columbia Street West on the Landing for more than three decades.
- 1959Henry's: the welder's restaurant on West Main
A landmark earned at the stove: Henry Freistroffer was a welder with seven children and an eighth coming when his wife's small inheritance gave him the stake to buy the tavern at 536 West Main Street in 1959; the family had grown up in Lakeside and bought close to home.
- 1959The Fort Wayne Artists Guild and the crafts guilds
The guild: The Fort Wayne Artists Guild — the documented guild line for the city's visual artists (no Fort Wayne "Art League" appears in the record reached)…
- 1959–1964A Lincoln Center for a factory city: the Kahn commission, 1961
The ambition: In 1959 the Fine Arts Foundation studied the needs of arts and culture in Fort Wayne, and the model it chose was the most ambitious in America: Lincoln Center in New York City.
- 1959–todayClassic Products Corp. (Fort Wayne Bowling Supply → The Classic Company → Classic Products Corp.)
Founded: 1959, Fort Wayne. Classic's own company history states it "was started by Bob Carteaux and Marty Schmidt in 1959 as Fort Wayne Bowling Supply (FWBS) in a small pro shop in the Key Lanes Bowling Center in Fort Wayne, Indiana."
- 1959–todayThe county ring — East Allen, Northwest Allen, Southwest Allen
What they are: Allen County outside the Fort Wayne Community Schools district is served by three consolidated corporations created under the Indiana School Reorganization Act of 1959, which required districts under 2,000 students to consolidate.