Fort Wayne, Indiana · 20th century
1990s
51 dated events in 1990s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
20th century 51 dated mentions
1990s
- 1990George Kalamaras — the poet laureate of the Fort Wayne faculty
George Kalamaras came to Fort Wayne in 1990 to teach English at Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne and stayed thirty-two years, retiring as professor emeritus at what is now Purdue University Fort Wayne.
- 1990Vorderman: the service shop that became the Volkswagen store
In 1990, with his wife Connie and a small team of skilled technicians, he opened Vorderman Motor Werks as a European import service operation on Ley Road — the shop where Fort Wayne's imported cars were kept running by the man whose name was on the building.
- 1990–todayThe culture, part three: the Fort Wayne Farm Show
The trade's winter marketplace: The Fort Wayne Farm Show was founded in 1990 by Jack Thill, owner of Tradexpos of Austin, Minnesota, who had visited Fort Wayne in the 1980s and started the show in the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum; Thill died in July 2015, aged 90, with the show long established.
- 1991The nitinol melt: Fort Wayne learns to make the metal itself
Fort Wayne Metals began working with nitinol in 1991, drawing wire from others' ingot.
- 1991The Burmese Christian congregations
The Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend's Catholic Charities established its Refugee Resettlement Program in 1975, after the fall of Saigon, and became a Bosnian resettlement site in 1993; the first Burmese refugees reached Fort Wayne in 1991, and in 2008 Catholic Charities resettled 1,469 refugees, primarily from Burma.
- 1991Where Indiana law drew the line
Glen Theatre, Inc. , 501 U.S. 560 (1991), the Supreme Court upheld Indiana's public-indecency statute, Indiana Code § 35-45-4-1, as applied to nude dancing in two South Bend establishments.
- 1991–2008Lloy Ball: IPFW's setter, and the third gold
He chose instead to play volleyball at IPFW for his father, from 1991 to 1995, a hometown decision this section records with some emphasis, because everything that followed was built on it.
- 1991–2023Basketball after the Pistons: the Fury and the Mad Ants, 1991–2023
The Fort Wayne Fury joined the Continental Basketball Association — the era's top minor league, the NBA's unofficial farm system — in 1991 and played ten seasons, the best of them the 1995-96 finals run, though the only winning season and only division title came in 1997-98, the league's coaching chair passing through…
- 1991–todayThe language wakes · myaamiaataweenki
The instruments were archives: the French missionary dictionaries, the treaty interpreters' vocabularies, and the wordlists that tribal families had kept in private hands…
- 1991–todayBunche Montessori Early Childhood Center
In 1991 Bunche became a magnet school offering a Montessori program for students from age three through fifth grade.
- 1991–todayCasey Cooper, COOP3RDRUMM3R: the most subscribed drummer comes to Sweetwater
Built elsewhere, landed here: Casey Aaron Cooper was born on 27 September 1991 in Arlington, Texas, opened his channel on 20 November 2007, and began posting in earnest in 2011, in his college days at Georgia State.
- 1992The unnamed · and the one who got her name back
Tabetha Ann Murlin: On May 15, 1992, a construction worker renovating a vacant house at 3512 Reynolds Street found a woman's body in its flooded basement, in eight to twelve inches of water.
- 1992A MacArthur Fellowship: John Henry Holland
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named him a MacArthur Fellow in 1992, the honor the press calls the genius grant; the Franklin Institute's Louis E. Levy Medal (1961) and the Harold Pender Award (1999) stand on either side of it in his record.
- 1992–1993All for One productions
Founding: all for One began in 1992 with a "what if" conversation among five friends who wanted a faith-based theatre company that would perform outside any church, "in the heart of the arts community."
- 1992–2024Joseph Corcoran · two trials, and the execution that ended a fifteen-year pause
On 14 April 1992 his parents, Jack Corcoran, 53, and Kathryn Corcoran, 47, were found shot dead at their home on Ball Lake in Steuben County.
- 1992–todayThe Prince Family: from a Little Caesars counter to twelve million
Two Fort Wayne kids: Damien Antwon Prince was born in Fort Wayne on 18 February 1992 and attended South Side High School.
- 1992–todayAlyssa Forever: the Allure winner who quit her job at a retirement home
The fastest rise in this section: Alyssa Wallace was born on 7 June 1992 and grew up in Fort Wayne. She started posting beauty videos to YouTube in 2013, after a photograph of her defined curls drew attention on Instagram, and the rise was close to immediate.
- 1993Headwaters Park is dedicated
The flood-control project remakes the old “Thumb” as the city's festival ground, the ground where the Current band's summer festival now stands.
- 1993Keith Busse, Mark Millett and Richard Teets — Steel Dynamics
Steel Dynamics was founded by three men who had already built one famous mill: Keith E. Busse, Mark D. Millett and Richard P. Teets Jr. were Nucor executives who had put up the Crawfordsville thin-slab minimill — the world's first — and in August 1993 they incorporated their own steel company in Indiana, headquartered in Fort Wayne.
- 1993The Mirro Center: a community system's research house
The system's clinical research department was founded in 1993, and by its own count Parkview has participated in more than 1,000 clinical trials of medical devices and pharmaceuticals since 1990…
- 1993–1995The public "clubs": Autumn Ridge and Chestnut Hills
Autumn Ridge Golf Club, at 11420 Old Auburn Road on the city's north side, opened in 1993, designed by Ernie Schrock — 7,103 yards, water in play on fifteen holes, a four-star rating in Golf Digest's places-to-play rankings as the Journal Gazette's directory reported it.
- 1993–2000Headwaters Park: the ten million that came from everybody
The gift: Downtown's floodplain park exists because a commission raised 10 million dollars from the private sector between 1993 and 2000 — businesses, foundations and residents giving to build Headwaters Park on land that had flooded for a century — and raised roughly 1 million dollars more as a maintenance endowment.
- 1993–todayBaseball returns: the Wizards and the TinCaps, 1993–today
Its first game, on 10 April 1993 at Waterloo, was won on a triple play turned before a crowd of about four thousand; the home opener followed on 19 April.
- 1993–todayBaseball returns: the Wizards and the TinCaps, 1993–today
Affiliated baseball came back on 19 April 1993, and it came back as the oldest franchise in its league.
- 1993–todaySteel Dynamics, Inc.
Founded: Incorporated in August 1993 in Indiana, headquartered in Fort Wayne at 6714 Pointe Inverness Way.
- 1994The bicentennial year: 1994
Two hundred years, marked in trails and stone: Fort Wayne celebrated the bicentennial of Wayne's fort in 1994, a century after the party it had nearly forgotten — and the year's most permanent product was a way of walking through the history itself.
- 1994The broadcast layer: public television's producers
WFWA — PBS Fort Wayne — has made local documentary in the city for decades; the library catalog credits Claudia Johnson as producer, writer, and editor of Fort Wayne Memories: The '50s (1994), the station's oral-history portrait of the city's postwar decade.
- 1994–1995The Saint Joe Road robbery · $174,441 and a detective down
The robbery: at about 10:30 in the morning on January 27, 1994, two men entered the NBD Bank at 5767 Saint Joe Road and robbed it of $174,441.68 — the largest bank take documented in Fort Wayne's record.
- 1994–1996The Rain Forest Decade: Dome, Orangutan Valley, Tiger Forest
The dome: In 1994 the zoo opened the Indonesian Rain Forest, a domed exhibit whose walk-through aviary put visitors inside a working rain forest of birds, fish and reptiles.
- 1994–2026The Crowds: Attendance and Honors, Dated
In 1994 the zoo drew 540,000 guests — the record until the African Journey broke it. In 2009 more than 613,000 came.
- 1995Parkview becomes a system: 1995, the north campus, and the Regional Medical Center of 2012
The system era began in May 1995, when Parkview Health System, Inc. was incorporated and the hospitals at Columbia City (Parkview Whitley) and Huntington joined it; Parkview Noble followed in 2000, Parkview LaGrange in 2005, Parkview Wabash in 2015, and Parkview DeKalb in 2019, with further hospitals…
- 1995The sale of Lutheran, the CHS era, and the fight of 2017–18
From church hospital to chain hospital: On 1 August 1995 the Lutheran Hospital Association sold the assets of Lutheran Hospital of Indiana to a subsidiary of Quorum Health Group.
- 1995The Orangutans: Tengku, Tara, Asmara, Raya
The line: The zoo's orangutan record begins with a single arrival: Tengku, a male Sumatran orangutan who came from Zoo Atlanta in 1995, the year Orangutan Valley opened.
- 1995Fantasy of Lights: Franke Park by car, at Christmas
The start, fixed by counting: No founding announcement for the Fantasy of Lights was found; its first season is fixed by the event's own season counts, which are consistent: the Waynedale News called 2021 the event's 27th year and 2023 its 29th season, and the arithmetic puts the first season in 1995, the same autumn…
- 1995–1998The hospital sales that became foundations — and an eight-million-dollar gift to a high school
When Lutheran Hospital was sold in 1995, the proceeds formed The Lutheran Foundation, which by its own history has disbursed more than 162 million dollars to faith and health causes across a ten-county area and still held assets above 200 million dollars in 2016.
- 1995–todayThe modern layer — health software, geothermal, and water
Medical Informatics Engineering was formed in Fort Wayne in 1995 by Doug Horner to move medical information securely, and launched the MedWeb, one of the nation's first health information exchanges…
- 1995–todayAndrea Russett: the teenager the radio station hired
The Fort Wayne start: Andrea Rose Russett was born in Fort Wayne on 27 June 1995, to Mark and Jacqui Russett, both graphic designers, and attended Bishop Dwenger High School until her junior year.
- 1996In the Company of Men (1997): the landmark
Archer's Atlantis Entertainment, working from East Coliseum Boulevard, raised the money and crewed the picture locally; Archer later recalled that the whole enterprise began at a meeting in the Acme Bar & Grill in the spring of 1996.
- 1996Salomon Farm, Dupont Road and the northwest connectors
Salomon Farm Park, at 817 West Dupont Road, became a city park in 1996 on the donated Salomon family farm.
- 1996–2026Purdue Fort Wayne's other seven-figure gifts: music, entrepreneurship, scholarships — and a naming gift whose amount was never published
A decade earlier, in 1996, the estate of Carlisle and Georgia Wilbur gave 1.7 million dollars for scholarships — at the time among the largest estate gifts in the university's record.
- 1997The modern layer: farms inside the city, and the shrinking map
Outward, the map keeps thinning: the censuses printed at the head of this section give the dated arithmetic — 65 percent of the county's land in farm uses in 1997, 281,635 acres in farms in 2017, and the 2022 count of 329,722 acres stated on its own terms…
- 1997Beverly Parker · the case that is not on the board
On the night of August 23, 1997, she was killed in her own home. Her son, who had been out at an all-night skating party, came home in the early morning hours and found her.
- 1997American Reel (1999): Archer directs
In the spring of 1997 financiers brought him a script called American Reel , written by Junior Burke and Scott Fivelson, with David Carradine and Ally Sheedy attached.
- 1997–1988The distinctions · multiple murders that were not a series
Joseph Corcoran was born in Fort Wayne in 1975, and on July 26, 1997, in the Fort Wayne house he shared with his sister, he shot and killed four men: his brother James Corcoran, his sister's fiancé Robert Scott Turner, and Timothy Bricker and Douglas Stillwell.
- 1997–2026Allen County Post 499 · the Hillegas Road post
Its bingo operation was one of the state's large ones: the state's 1997 charity-gaming report credits Post 499 with $1,981,125 in bingo gross receipts.
- 1998The Rumble in Fort Wayne
The indoor tradition, revived: When the Coliseum's Exposition Center opened in 1998, Ohio concert promoter Tony Barhorst and race promoter Jack Calabrase — the city's proclamation names both as the Rumble's founders…
- 1998St. Augustine Lutheran Church: a pan-African congregation
St. Augustine Lutheran Church was founded in 1998 by an African student at the city's Lutheran seminary, expressly to serve the African refugees then arriving in Fort Wayne; it affiliated with the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod in 2001.
- 1999Just Neighbors: the interfaith shelter
In 1999 local congregations created the Interfaith Hospitality Network of Greater Fort Wayne, a chapter of the national model: homeless families sleep overnight in rotating local churches — a different congregation each week providing the rooms, the meals and the volunteers — and spend their days at a central day centre downtown.
- 1999The micro-budget decades: horror in a dying cinema, and the $11 opening
The genealogical society's list, drawn from IMDb location data, also places parts of The Freak (1999) in Fort Wayne, on a shoot that ranged across Spencerville, Cedar Canyon, Garrett, Auburn and Waterloo; nothing further about it reached print in the sources this record could reach.
- 1999–2023DaMarcus Beasley: four World Cups out of South Side
The rise: At the 1999 Under-17 World Cup in New Zealand, Beasley won the Silver Ball as the tournament's second best player, behind his teammate Landon Donovan, and turned professional with the Chicago Fire.
- 1999–2024What is headquartered here now
Tower and Old National: The one attempt to rebuild a hometown bank in the old tower came from local money: in 1999 John Tippmann Sr., who had acquired and refurbished the Lincoln Bank Tower, formed Tower Bank there with a group of Fort Wayne investors.