Fort Wayne, Indiana, was in the 50s one of those place names that appeared only on birth certificates and death notices. Nothing worthy of any other section of the news ever seemed to happen there. Before the airlines took travelers over it, trains and roads carried people through it on their way to a game at Notre Dame in South Bend or to shopping or business in Chicago. In the forties there was an Air Force base there, but the people who knew the city that way are gone now, most of them.
There's a nice little park there commemorating the founder, "Mad" Anthony Wayne and, thanks to the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company, a great collection of Lincoln memorabilia. I never knew why he was called Mad Anthony nor, like most residents, did I ever visit the Lincoln exhibit. To my knowledge, in my day Fort Wayne didn't have a tourist bureau or need for one. Anyone who was there lived there. The town was associated with a few famous people - Carole Lombard, the movie star, and Herb Shriner, the comedian, but those folks didn't live there, they were from there.
Growing up in Fort Wayne in the 50s was exactly - for those who remember the show - like living in Happy Days. Everyone, all the adults, worked at one of the big industries like General Electric, Fruehoff Trailers, Capehart-Farnsworth, Magnavox, Wayne Pump, or Zollner Pistons, or at one of the stores downtown. Unemployment was strictly voluntary and there were always more jobs than job seekers. My father was a letter carrier and, later, a clerk at the Post Office and my mother, when she felt like getting out of the house or the need for extra money, worked at a local drug store dispensing cold remedies and panty hose.
Old Fred Zollner, before he moved the whole shebang to Detroit, had a huge hand in making Fort Wayne a sports town. Not only did he sponsor the professional basketball team then known as the Fort Wayne Pistons but also a men's fast pitch softball team that regularly won the world's championship. Until I got old enough to be on my own, going to Piston games with my parents was a frequent and thrilling activity. I especially liked basketball, and my father and I spent many a winter night at the North Side High School gym where the games were played. We watched with awe and admiration the glorious rain-bringing 30 foot two-hand set shots of Bobby McDermott and the raw strength of center Ed Sadowski - at 6'6" and 260 pounds the biggest man we ever saw. We were there the night Sadowski got exasperated with the opposing center and threw him into the third row and we witnessed the set shot duel between McDermott and Eddy Sailor for the scoring championship of the season. Great stuff, but destructive for the kids my age who all tried to copy the pros. It took many formative years for me to accept the difference between their athletic skill and the mimicry I used to hide my own lack of coordination. And there were the Daisies, a girls' professional softball team. The Daisies were fun to watch. They wore short skirts and some, like Dotty Schroeder, were very good looking. I think my father liked that, too, since the bedroom door was often locked after we came home from a game.
Until the last year of my high school tenure, the Fort Wayne I lived in was completely white. There were no blacks on any of the teams I watched or played on, not a single African American among the 1300 students of my high school, and none in any of the social groups I was a part of. There was a significant black population in the town, but they lived in a clearly defined section and attended different schools than "we" did. I don't remember ever actually exchanging words of any kind with any black person until, in 1949, one lone boy broke the unseen barrier and enrolled at South Side High School. I wish now I had gotten to know him - and his parents - but I didn't. He must have been scared to death by his isolation and our aloofness, but he carried himself with a swagger that made us - me, at least - afraid of him. Unlike events nearly twenty years later, his matriculation at a formerly all white school did not make the news. There were no protests, no placards, no jeers, no reporters; he just showed up one day and we went on with our individual and collective business. Only once did I ever hear anything negative about it - when a friend of mine worried out loud about the threat of what he called "the gray race." Due to the wisdom of our teachers, administrators (especially our principal, Mr. Snider), politicians, and parents, we never knew there was an issue'. Labels such as racist and bigot never came up. I've often thought of this non-event, what made our town different from so many others, and I think it had to do with prosperity: the fact that good wages and plentiful jobs prevented there being any notion that blacks - educated, integrated blacks - posed a threat to us whites. Maybe it was something more spiritual - that would be nice.
Beyond the economic stability, the thing about Fort Wayne that contributed most to its character was it plethora of parks. Somewhere along the way, city leaders had decided that recreation was as important as occupation. And so the city was teeming with spacious, beautifully maintained public parks. There were golf courses, tennis courts, softball and baseball diamonds, a zoo, huge expanses of walking trails and picnicking areas, and, long before anyone heard of boys clubs or girls clubs, buildings where you could get, free of charge, horseshoes, balls and bats, tennis rackets, and, in the winter, ice skates. Not only did these parks provide sports and other outdoor recreation, they were the locations for many a young lover's introduction to the form and function of the opposite sex. Many a horny pubescent got his or her first French kiss or tactile awareness of the other's anatomy in the bushes of a public park. While such places were isolated and potentially dangerous, no one - at least to public knowledge - was ever raped or mugged in a park in Fort Wayne. Such words and the acts they denoted were not part of the lexicon of growing up in that city.
Fort Wayne enjoys the seasons: winter, summer, spring, and fall, and each one was a special time for special things. In winter, people of all ages - though it always seemed best suited to those little kids who only fell a couple of feet - skated on the frozen ponds.
And snow. Lots of snow. Is there anything as wonderful as snow? Not for kids, there's not. With snow comes sliding - not so great for motorists or aging pedestrians, but marvelous if you're young and there's a hill. The biggest hill in my part of town was the one at Reservoir Park. This park also had a large pond that froze over and where ice skaters played crack the whip or practiced their Sonya Heine moves. We'd drag our sleds or, if we didn't have a sled a flattened cardboard box, to the top of the hill. It was, I guess, maybe forty feet high. While the slide down was fun - if nothing got in the way, you could zoom onto the frozen pond and terrify the skaters - but the real thrill was to crash, to go tumbling head over heels over sled down the embankment after hitting a tree or missing a turn. If the snow was deep enough, the older boys played "pom-pom-pullaway" where you tried to run from one goal to another before someone tackled you. The last man tackled was the winner. The joy of all this winter rough and tumble was that the snow and the layers of clothing you wore kept you from getting hurt when you or someone else threw your body around.
Summer was lake time. As soon as school was out, we headed for the lakes, primarily Lake James and its teen age hangout, Bledsoe's Beach. At Bledsoe's there was a boat ramp and dock, a restaurant where you could get a hamburger and a pink lemonade and five plays for a quarter on the jukebox, and a swimming area with a rectangular pier you could dive from or lie on to work on your tan. The big feature of Bledsoe's was a dance pavilion. Every evening live bands played the popular songs of the day and with a five-cent ticket you could have a dance with one of the girls who hung around waiting for an invitation. Full many a summer romance blossomed to the strains of Laura wafting over the waters of Lake James.
Although Spring has a reputation for turning a young man's fancy, it never meant much to us. Fort Wayne was a city of parks and natural beauty (if you stayed away from the factories), but blooming flowers and budding trees meant little to the high schoolers of the 50s. All they meant to me was that the winter games were over and the joys of summer were soon to follow.
It was Fall that turned my fancy. It still does. There was a feeling about autumn in Fort Wayne in the 50s that goes far beyond weather and calendars. For one, there is the breathtaking beauty of the umber and sienna shades of dying leaves, the way they crackle when you step on them, the burnt dust smell of them. There was the social whirl of football games and after game dances in the cafeteria and the back-to-school making and renewing of friendships. But, most significant of all fall phenomena, were clothes. In fall, the girls began to appear in ankle-length pleated wrap-around skirts held together with an outsized safety pin, white bobby socks and saddle shoes, and - most wonderful of all - those angora sweaters that looked (and felt, for those so fortunate as to get a touch) as warm and soft as a baby rabbit's fur.
Fall, as I remember it (remembrance no doubt romanticized and selective) was the time for dating, for taking your girl out to a movie and a bite to eat. In the fall and, indeed, all the year, there were two foci of activity. For shopping and first run movies, everything was contained in an area of three by four blocks between Jefferson and Berry and centered on Calhoun. The big stores, principally Wolf & Dessauer and Franks, were there, along with banks and restaurants and theaters. It was easy to get to, as was anyplace else in town, by streetcar. The streetcars were like small railroad cars: they ran on rails and were powered through a spring- loaded antenna that contacted an electric line suspended above the street. Besides reliable transportation, these electric trams provided a beautiful sight in winter when ice covered the power lines and the contact produced a wake of sparks like a fiery spume from a fast motorboat. Besides the first run houses downtown, there were neighborhood theaters like the Rialto at Calhoun and Pontiac and the Indiana on Broadway that showed second-run double features. But for dates, the theaters downtown were where you saw the latest Lewis and Martin comedy or Gene Kelly musical. I vividly remember two films from that period - A Place in the Sun and Duel in the Sun, partly because of the fantasies generated in a young man's mind by Jennifer Jones and Elizabeth Taylor and partly because of the romantic mood of my date after she watched Gregory Peck or Montgomery Clift. And there were drive-ins where you went to watch those movies about 50 foot monsters, but that's a whole other story.
The other focus of Fort Wayne life was Hall's Drive In just over the bridge on Bluffton Road at the bottom of Broadway. The inside restaurant at Hall's was a popular spot for whole families, especially after church on Sundays, but the outside, at least after dark, belonged to the teens. If you wanted to order you pulled in to a spot along one of the bays that came out from the central building like stiff octopus legs. Your food and drinks were brought to you on a tray that hung from a partly lowered window. If you were there just to socialize, you drove slowly around and around and around the perimeter until you saw someone you knew or wanted to know. Halls was the scene for flirtations, occasional battles for dominance among the males (generally, like most such mammalian squabbles, more posturing than injuring), and general youthful bonding. Halls was a metaphor for all of Fort Wayne. The food was good and simple and consistent, the buildings and grounds were clean and safe, the staff efficient, friendly, and patient, and people of all ages and types mixed comfortably and unjudgmentally.
Halls also gave an indication of just how much our lives came to depend on cars - how the comfort we felt in their convenience led us to the growth of shopping malls, the deaths of down towns and public transportation, and the elimination of pedestrian traffic (that is, life in the streets) in all but the most urbane of cities.
Was life better then? I don't know. It certainly was fun. I'm grateful to all the citizens of Fort Wayne, Indiana, my contemporaries and well as those who went before. The heritage of tolerance, their work ethic, their respect for fun and fair play, and especially their trust in the ultimate if sometimes suspect maturation of their young people made it a truly Happy Days place in which to grow.
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