Saturday, December 6, 2025 post by the Historic 07 District - Fort Wayne on Facebook:
For generations, families have stood in awe beneath the towering Santa and his reindeer, a spectacle that has become one of the city’s most cherished holiday traditions. The Santa display has endured relocations, war years, decades of storage, and numerous restorations, yet through it all, it has remained a symbol of our community. Almost no one, however, could name the person who conceived it.
Her name was Isabel Wilkinson Parker, and yes, she grew up and lived in the 07 for most of her life.
In 1940, Isabel was a young commercial artist working for Brinkman Sign Company. The Wolf & Dessauer store approached Brinkman with the idea of something grand for the holidays, and Isabel transformed that loose vision into the form that has endured for more than eighty years. She sketched Santa. She engineered the reindeer positioning. And she conceived the cracking-whip animation, an element that astonished Fort Wayne when the lights first switched on, and that continues to delight residents today.
She did not arrive in town as an outsider or a consultant. While she was designing the Santa display, she lived at 3124 Fairfield Avenue, and her widowed mother, Matilda, lived close by at 128 West Sherwood Terrace until she died in 1966. Isabel had trained at the Fort Wayne Art School, graduating in 1929. She never stopped improving. Even after she was working full-time, she spent her Thursday nights taking advanced figure drawing classes back at the art school. A 1937 alumni write-up described her commercial work as “the art that sells,” emphasizing not only her talent but her importance to her employer. In a time when few women were encouraged toward professional artistic careers, Isabel was already proving indispensable.
Not much is known about her after the 1940s, but what endures is clear. She gave Fort Wayne something that became part of the city’s identity. When families gather each winter to look up at the Santa now mounted downtown, they are unknowingly paying tribute to her creativity and skill.
Isabel passed away in 1997, but she left a legacy, one that thousands of Fort Wayne residents have experienced without ever knowing her name.
Isabel W. Wilkinson Parker memorial on Find A Grave.
We’ll have live music and free hot chocolate on the plaza, too 
: Photo by John McGauley