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A correction first: Do it Best is sometimes assumed to be a family company. It is not, and never was. It is a member-owned cooperative, and its scale — more than $6 billion in annual sales, and in 2022 the largest privately held company in Indiana — belongs to its thousands of member store owners, not to any Fort Wayne family.
The founder: Arnold Gerberding (1900–1977) founded Hardware Wholesalers, Inc. in Fort Wayne on June 28, 1945 — the company records the founding group as 75 independent hardware and building-materials dealers; a published company history counts 96 subscribers at the incorporation meeting. The cooperative took the name Do it Best Corp. in 1998 and moved its world headquarters to the Electric Works campus in 2022.
What it left: The civic fortune ran through its second president instead. The Congressional Record's 2019 tribute to Don Wolf, who succeeded Gerberding, records that Wolf was the first president of Big Brothers of Greater Fort Wayne, the founder of Study Connection — the tutoring program that pairs Fort Wayne students with mentors — and a member of the Junior Achievement Hall of Fame. The cooperative's legacy to the city is institutional: a headquarters that anchored first the north side and then Electric Works, and a model of ownership deliberately spread too wide to make any one family rich.
Sources:
- Do it Best Corp., "About Us" — the 1945 founding by Arnold Gerberding with 75 dealers; the 1998 renaming; the Electric Works headquarters.
- Allen County Genealogical Society — Arnold Gerberding (1900–1977), founder of Hardware Wholesalers; published company history (company-histories record) — 96 subscribers at incorporation.
- Congressional Record, vol. 165 (September 17, 2019) — the tribute to Don Allen Wolf: Big Brothers, Study Connection, Junior Achievement Hall of Fame.