Fort Wayne, Indiana · 20th century
1980s
73 dated events in 1980s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
20th century 73 dated mentions
1980s
- 1980The shooting of Vernon Jordan · Fort Wayne in the first CNN broadcast
On the night of 29 May 1980 Fort Wayne became, for a week, the dateline of the national civil-rights story.
- 1980Samuel Little · two Fort Wayne women, one night in 1980
Valeria Boyd was eighteen and Mary Ann Porter was thirty-one, both of Fort Wayne, and both were reported missing to the Fort Wayne police by their families in late October 1980.
- 1980The moved houses
Placed on the National Register in 1979, the house was moved from its original site in 1980 with the help of the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana — the state organization now called Indiana Landmarks…
- 1980–2020Samuel Little · two Fort Wayne women, one night in 1980
Valeria Boyd was eighteen and Mary Ann Porter was thirty-one, both of Fort Wayne, and both were reported missing to the Fort Wayne police by their families in late October 1980.
- 1980–todayAfter the Scout: collapse, Homecoming, and a revival in South Carolina
International Harvester entered the 1980s in collapse — sustained losses through the fiscal years 1980–84 and a crippling strike in 1979–80 among them — and the Scout line, a low-volume passenger vehicle inside a truck and farm-equipment company, was ended in October 1980 as the company contracted.
- 1981A medical school's research campus: IU School of Medicine—Fort Wayne
The program began in 1981 with four students on the IPFW campus; under its second director, Ragatz, from 1987, it built the apparatus of research — a student research fellowship program, a cardiovascular research program and an endowed professorship…
- 1981–2026The prosecutors — Richards's twenty years and the chief deputy who waited
She had entered it in 1981 as the first woman to serve as a deputy prosecutor in its criminal division, and she won the office itself at the election of 2002 — the first woman elected Allen County prosecutor — taking her seat in January 2003 and holding it through five terms.
- 1982The flood fight
The award followed in the National Civic League's 1982–83 cycle — the League's own roll of winners prints “Fort Wayne 1982-83,” while the city's accounts usually say 1983 — the first of four All-America City titles (1998, 2009 and 2021 followed).
- 1982The flood fight
Sandbag lines at Memorial Coliseum, the Pemberton dike saved, President Reagan on the line on 16 March, and the All-America City award in 1983.
- 1982International Harvester announces the end
On Monday 27 September 1982, International Harvester announced it would close its Fort Wayne works; the announcement front-paged the Journal Gazette the next morning.
- 1982The Flood Fight · March 1982, and the city that saved itself
The waters began rising on the night of 12 March 1982. The forecast crest — just over nineteen feet — proved badly wrong; the rivers kept rising, dikes began to fail, and Fort Wayne went to war with its own geography in what became the most famous week in the city's modern history.
- 1982After the waters: thirty years of arguing about the walls
The argument's frame: The flood fights that were not lawsuits were budget fights, and they ran for thirty years after the great flood of March 1982 — the flood that followed a winter of 81.2 inches of snow, the most since 1911, and put the Maumee within sight of the 1913 record.
- 1982Vera Bradley: a 1982 company whose public win landed in the web era
Not a dot-com startup — printed here because its win belongs to the era: Vera Bradley was founded in Fort Wayne in 1982 by Barbara Bradley Baekgaard and Patricia R. Miller, selling quilted cotton handbags from a city that had no reason to expect a national fashion brand; its full history sits in the Business record.
- 1982Barbara Bradley Baekgaard and Patricia R. Miller — Vera Bradley
In March 1982, waiting for a flight in Atlanta, Barbara Bradley Baekgaard and Patricia R. Miller noticed the lack of feminine luggage in the airport.
- 1982Vera Bradley: the quilted bag as a Fort Wayne fashion house
In March 1982, Fort Wayne neighbors Patricia R. Miller and Barbara Bradley Baekgaard, waiting out a flight in Atlanta, noticed that the luggage rolling past them was hard-sided, dark, and — in the word the company's own histories keep — not feminine.
- 19821982–1991: the bulletin and chronology cases
Oxford Street, 1982: The A.P.R.O. Bulletin — the journal of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, one of the era's two national civilian groups…
- 1982–1983Harvester's end · the closing of the Fort Wayne Works, 1982–1983
In March 1982 — in the very weeks the city was sandbagging against the flood — the company announced that unless government incentives changed the arithmetic, one of its two great truck plants, Fort Wayne or the seventeen-year-old plant at Springfield, Ohio, would close.
- 1982–todayVera Bradley
Founded: In March 1982, waiting for a flight in Atlanta, neighbours Barbara Bradley Baekgaard and Patricia R. Miller noticed the lack of feminine luggage and decided to make some.
- 1983Community Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Indiana
Founding: Community Harvest was incorporated in 1983, founded by leaders of the city's business, religious and government sectors in the wake of the factory closures that defined Fort Wayne's early-1980s — its own current materials name the International Harvester plant closure specifically.
- 1983A Pulitzer for the newspaper: the News-Sentinel and the flood
The 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Local General or Spot News Reporting went to the Editorial Staff of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, in the Pulitzer board's citation, "for its courageous and resourceful coverage of a devastating flood in March 1982."
- 1983The city's own: All-America City, four times over
The National Civic League's All-America City Award belongs to the city itself, and Fort Wayne has won it four times — 1983, 1998, 2009 and 2021 — a count that puts it in the award's four-time winners' circle; the League has named ten communities a year since 1949.
- 1983Rails — and a canal — into trails · the mechanism
The legal device that keeps an abandoned railroad corridor intact in the United States is railbanking: under the 1983 amendments to the National Trails System Act, a railroad and a trail sponsor may agree that a line proposed for abandonment instead be preserved as a trail on an interim basis, holding the corridor together…
- 1983The Botanical Conservatory: winter, abolished for an afternoon
The Conservatory opened in November 1983 at 1100 South Calhoun Street, owned and operated by the Parks Department, and the first plant installed in the gardens was a beefsteak begonia, a houseplant for a city's house.
- 1983–1985The Grand Wayne Center opens
The Grand Wayne Center rose at 120 West Jefferson Boulevard, on the site of the old Jefferson Theater — ground was broken in April 1983, in a season of 20 percent interest rates with the 8,000-employee International Harvester plant in the act of closing…
- 1983–1998Deregulation and the loss of the headquarters
The thrifts go first: On 30 November 1983 the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's histories record a single day's work: the First Federal Savings and Loan Association of Fort Wayne — the city's own, established 1933…
- 1983–2009Rod Woodson: from Snider High School to Canton
Roderick Kevin Woodson was born on 10 March 1965 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the youngest of three siblings, and attended R. Nelson Snider High School, class of 1983, starring in football, basketball, and track.
- 1983–2013Eric Wedge: Northrop's state champion who managed a pennant race
Eric Michael Wedge was born on 27 January 1968 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, played in the city's Wallen Little League, and attended Northrop High School, where as a freshman he played on Northrop's 1983 state champion baseball team.
- 1984Fairmount Place: flood land sold for a song
The buyout: In 1984 the city spent $350,000 to buy seventeen homes along Fairmount Place, just north of the St. Marys River off Wells Street, and demolish them for flood protection.
- 1984David Ruoff — "I dug the first ditch"
He worked in the mortgage industry from 1959, and in 1984 he founded the Dave Ruoff Mortgage Company in Fort Wayne with eighteen employees.
- 1984The Greater Fort Wayne Aviation Museum
The Greater Fort Wayne Aviation Museum was started in 1984 by local aviation enthusiasts, with Myers as its first president and longtime curator, and grew into some 6,000 square feet of cases on the second floor of the Lieutenant Paul Baer Terminal at Fort Wayne International Airport…
- 1984Formats: the comedy room, the retro club, the martini bar
The business record dates Snickerz Inc. to January 1, 1984, incorporated June 24, 1985, with Kevin Ferguson as president.
- 1984Snickerz: the first stand-up room, 1984 to the mid-2010s
The Better Business Bureau's profile of Snickerz Inc. dates the business to January 1, 1984, with incorporation on June 24, 1985, and Kevin Ferguson as president.
- 1984The National Inventors Hall of Fame: Philo Farnsworth
The National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted him in 1984, thirteen years after his death, for the electronic television system.
- 1984The Festival of Trees: the Embassy at Christmas
The founding bracket: The Embassy Theatre dates its Festival of Trees to 1984, and its own 2014 history of the festival explains the arithmetic: in 1984 Maryellen Rice, a member of the theatre's board, asked her neighbor Barb Wigham, general manager of WPTA-TV, for a fundraiser idea, and Wigham recalled a festival of…
- 1984–1986General Motors comes
The replacement anchor arrived two years after Harvester's announcement: GM's coming was celebrated on 31 August 1984, on a plant investment reported at about $500 million and some 3,000 jobs.
- 1984–1986General Motors chooses Fort Wayne · the replacement anchor
In August 1984, thirteen months after the last Harvester truck, General Motors announced it would build an all-new full-size pickup plant on greenfield ground at Lafayette Center Road and Interstate 69, southwest of the city — a $500 million initial investment and about 3,000 jobs.
- 1984–todayRuoff Mortgage — first the Dave Ruoff Mortgage Company
Founded: 1984, in Fort Wayne, as the Dave Ruoff Mortgage Company, by David Ruoff, who had worked in the mortgage business since 1959.
- 1985Eleven days of Mayor Simon
On 8 July 1985 Mayor Winfield Moses Jr. resigned, having pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor violations of the campaign-finance laws arising from his re-election campaign.
- 1985The cargo decades: Burlington, Kitty Hawk, and the second airport inside the airport
For twenty years the freighters ran the night: Fort Wayne's second airport — the cargo airport inside the southwest field — began in 1985, when Burlington Air Express, later BAX Global, opened a hub on the field…
- 1985The transplant era: a heart in 1985, a kidney in 2007, the close in 2023
Northern Indiana's first heart transplant: In 1985 a Lutheran Hospital team led by Dr. Michael Schatzlein performed the first heart transplant in northern Indiana — the scope most accounts give it…
- 1985The city's own answer: the Grand Wayne Center and its Hilton, 1985
A hotel as public works: The Grand Wayne Convention Center opened on January 18, 1985, after five years of planning and construction and a $12 million investment, under the Fort Wayne–Allen County Convention and Tourism Authority.
- 1985Eleven days of Mayor Simon
The episode: On 8 July 1985 Mayor Winfield Moses Jr. resigned, having pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor violations of the campaign-finance laws arising from his re-election campaign.
- 1985–todayThe Genealogy Center's national standing
Genealogy visitors numbered 26,000 in 1985. By 1990 the department held more than 169,000 volumes and 185,000 microtext items — the largest genealogy collection in a public library in the United States, second under one roof only to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City.
- 1986General Motors arrives
General Motors began construction of its Fort Wayne Assembly plant in 1984 — a $500 million commitment on greenfield ground southwest of the city at Lafayette Center Road and I-69, technically in Roanoke…
- 1986Habitat for Humanity of Greater Fort Wayne
Founding: Habitat for Humanity of Greater Fort Wayne was established in 1986 as a grassroots affiliate of Habitat for Humanity International (founded nationally in 1976), spearheaded by local church leaders and community members.
- 1986More family tables: China Palace and RMY's
RMY's Restaurant, on Wayne Trace, carries the other migration: Yolanda Johnson and her mother Maggie Fuqua have run it since 1986 on recipes from the family's Alabama years — fried chicken, candied yams, collard greens, peach cobbler — handed down, in Yolanda's words, from "the women who came before."
- 1986The claim that fails: Hoosiers was not filmed here
A borrowed classic: No false claim in Fort Wayne's film record is hardier than the one that gives the city a piece of Hoosiers (1986), Indiana's beloved basketball picture.
- 1986–1994Before the web: the bulletin boards, and the unanswered ISP question
The record names them: Secret Service, running in 1986; NEI BBS, Doug Tanner's Wildcat! board, 1986 to 1989; The Silicon Alternative, Don Gump's board, 1988 to 1994; Byte Carrier, also listed as NE Indiana Net, Ron Kuhn's system, 1989 to 1991; The Outpost, Eric Asberry's, from 1989…
- 1986–todayGM Fort Wayne Assembly: the living plant, at its true address
The plant's record: Construction began in 1984; the first pickup was built on 8 December 1986, with about 3,000 employees and a payroll above $100 million at the opening.
- 1986–todayPERSI and the Witcher era
PERSI: The Periodical Source Index was created in 1986 by Genealogy Center and ACPL Foundation staff, edited by Clegg and others, and funded by the Foundation's Christman Fund, built on a bequest of about 60,000 dollars.
- 1987Ashley C. Ford — the Fort Wayne childhood that became Somebody's Daughter
Born and raised in Fort Wayne: Ashley C. Ford was born in Fort Wayne in January 1987 and raised here by her mother and grandmother.
- 1987Science Central
Founding: Science Central was incorporated as a nonprofit in 1987 — originally the Science Collective of Northeast Indiana — by teachers, parents, engineers, and community leaders who wanted a hands-on science discovery center for the region's children.
- 1987Sycamore Hills Golf Club
The club's own clubhouse history dates its founding to July 1987, and its federal social-club ruling is dated December of that year.
- 1987DeBrand: the chocolate house on Auburn Park Drive
In October 1987 she opened DeBrand Fine Chocolates — "De," the French prefix for "from," before her maiden name — in a room her parents gave her in their business, by other accounts in her childhood home on Wells Street; the Wells Street location was destroyed by fire three years later, and she rebuilt.
- 1987The Australian Adventure, 1987
The build: In 1987 the zoo opened the Australian Adventure, a five-acre exhibit built at a cost of $2.5 million — the zoo's second great expansion and, by the zoo's own account, one of the first exhibits in the nation to immerse visitors in a continent's culture as well as its animals, using Australian architecture…
- 1987–1992Glenbrook Commons: the mall's power-center shadow
Glenbrook Commons, on Lima Road directly beside the mall, was built in two campaigns, 1987 and 1992, originally developed by the mall's own builders, Landau & Heyman, though it passed under separate ownership and was managed by Zamias Services while the mall belonged to General Growth.
- 1987–2015The Tasmanian Devils: A North American Record and a Return
The first era: From 1987 — the Australian Adventure's opening year — to 2004, the Fort Wayne Children's Zoo housed twelve Tasmanian devils, more than any other North American zoo, in the zoo's own release's words; the zoo's compiled history gives the distinction at United States scope, and both scopings stand as their sources give them.
- 1988The machinery: a customs station and Foreign-Trade Zone 182
By a final rule of the U.S. Customs Service effective 27 July 1988 (Treasury Decision 88-35), the newly approved Customs facility at Fort Wayne was designated a Customs station…
- 1988"International": the customs station and the name, 1988–1991
By Treasury Decision 88-35, published in the Customs Bulletin of 6 July 1988 and effective 27 July 1988, the U.S. Customs Service designated the newly approved customs facility at Fort Wayne as a customs station, placed under the supervision of the Indianapolis port of entry in the Cleveland district, expressly to…
- 1988The Hoosier Lottery arrives
On November 8, 1988, the state's voters lifted the ban, approving the lottery referendum by 62 percent. The General Assembly ratified the Lottery Act on May 3, 1989, and the governor signed it a week later; a director and a commission were in place by midsummer.
- 1988Two eleventh hours: the bridge and the station
The bridge that left the list: ARCH's history names the Wells Street Bridge as the early success "moved off" its Most Endangered List: the 1884 iron bridge over the St. Marys — the first iron bridge built over the city's rivers…
- 1988Seated here, I: the Komets Hall of Fame
The hall: The Fort Wayne Komets' Hall of Fame, established in 1988, honours the club in three sections — Executive Builders, Team Personnel and Media — and lives with the club at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum.
- 1988–1999The Helmke years
Paul Helmke , a Republican in a Democratic city, won three straight terms (1988–1999) — the last Fort Wayne mayor to do so.
- 1988–2018April Tinsley · the case that waited thirty years
On Good Friday, 1 April 1988, she was playing between friends' houses in her Fort Wayne neighborhood when, at about three in the afternoon, she went back to one house to fetch her umbrella.
- 1989Aboite Branch
The Aboite Branch was built in 1989, in the building program of Director Jeffrey Krull's first years, together with the Dupont Branch.
- 1989Dupont Branch
The Dupont Branch was built in 1989 with the Aboite Branch, serving the Dupont Road corridor on the city's northwest side.
- 1989Trauma, verified: the first verified centers outside Indianapolis
Parkview created its Trauma Services Department in 1989 with the stated goal of verification by the American College of Surgeons as a Level II trauma center.
- 1989Boys & Girls Clubs of Fort Wayne
Founding: The Boys & Girls Clubs of Fort Wayne began in 1989 in a small three-room office on Minor Street, serving low-income children and youth with the national movement's program of academic success, character and leadership, and healthy lifestyles.
- 1989Study Connection
Founding: Study Connection was founded in 1989 by Don Wolf, the retired chief executive of Do it Best Corp. — the same man who had founded Big Brothers of Greater Fort Wayne seventeen years earlier (see that entry).
- 1989Heather Headley: Trinidad to Northrop to a Tony Award
In 1989, when she was fifteen, her father, a pastor, was called to the McKee Street Church of God in Fort Wayne, and the family emigrated to Indiana.
- 1989A home of its own: Carroll Road, 1989
The founding: In 1989 the Allen County Fair got the thing it had never had, a permanent home built for it. With an original land grant from the county, the Allen County Fairgrounds began as a self-supporting organization in 1989, and the Allen County Fair was held for the first time on the grounds that year.
- 1989–1996Colin Chin: the hometown captain
From 1989 to his retirement in 1996 he wore the captain's letter, the longest captaincy in franchise history. He led the Komets to the Turner Cup championship of 1993, followed it with a career-best 100-point season, and served as player-coach in 1994-95, near the end.
- 1989–todayThe culture, part two: pulls at the county fair, and Arcola's weekend
The fair's pull strip: The Allen County Fair's own history belongs to the Farms section (one line: its permanent home since 1989 is the Allen County Fairgrounds at 2726 Carroll Road, founded that year as the home of the fair and of Allen County 4-H).