Fort Wayne Mayor Thomas C. Henry died Thursday evening after announcing his stomach cancer diagnosis last month.
Henry, 72, announced he had late-stage stomach cancer at a news conference Feb. 26. He entered hospice care Thursday after being taken to a hospital for a medical emergency related to his cancer early Wednesday.
Henry won a fifth term as mayor in November, running against Republican Tom Didier. He took office in January 2008 and became the longest-serving mayor in the city’s history as measured by consecutive terms.
Henry was preceded in death by his wife, Cindy Henry, who died Jan. 20 after fighting pancreatic cancer for more than a year. He is survived by his children Benjamin and Elizabeth and four grandchildren.
Henry is the second oldest of 17 children. He was born in Indianapolis while his father, Jerry, was earning a master’s degree in social work. The Henry family returned to Fort Wayne when Tom Henry was 4.
He graduated from Central Catholic High School in 1970 and later received a bachelor’s degree in psychology and master’s in business administration from Saint Francis College, which is now the University of Saint Francis.
Henry served in the Army until 1973 – the same year he met his wife. The two met when Cindy was 17 and Tom was 21, while working at Scott’s grocery store on Decatur Road, according to an October 2005 Journal Gazette article. She was a cashier when Henry was hired as a security guard.
The two married on June 21, 1975, at St. Henry’s Catholic Church, which Henry said in a 1996 interview was a moment he would never forget.
“It was extremely hot, no air conditioning in the church or reception hall,” he said. “My uncle and my brothers kept me up the whole night before. My wife was absolutely gorgeous. What an angel! What a day!”
Henry was elected to the Fort Wayne City Council as the 3rd District representative in November 1983. He served for 20 years on council until losing the 2003 election.
During his time on the council, Henry worked to amend a restaurant smoking ban that he was described by The Journal Gazette as being ambivalent on and change city ordinance to protect the LGBTQ+ community from discrimination.
When Henry became mayor in 2008, one of his focuses was downtown development.
“If you don’t have a vibrant, thriving, exciting, inviting downtown, then the probability of your city being a success is pretty low,” he said in a December 2023 Journal Gazette article. “So we took that gamble 16 years ago that that’s where we’re going to put our initial investment, and all of our efforts and passion was going to be in developing downtown, and it appears to have worked.”
But with downtown development, opportunities Henry weren’t expecting came to light. He said in December that riverfront development was not a part of his original plan, and more infrastructure had come to the city than he originally envisioned.
“We’ve been fortunate, blessed to have won a couple dozen awards over the past several years both at the state and national level,” Henry said in the article. “And that can do nothing but fare well for our city. … So this momentum continues at a degree that – quite frankly – was more than I had anticipated.”
Henry said in that same article that he was excited about the Google data center development planned for the southeast quadrant of Fort Wayne. He had added that the development would help put Fort Wayne on the map.
Despite the city’s successes under Henry’s time in office, he still faced controversies. Henry was arrested on a drunken-driving charge after a car crash on Oct. 8, 2022.
No one was hurt in the accident when he sideswiped another vehicle, but Henry served a suspended sentence and was ordered to pay more than $3,000 in restitution.
Henry said this year at a news conference that Fort Wayne officials will focus on public safety by addressing the recent increases in youth homicides. When running for his fifth term, Henry said in a September article that public safety was one of his top-five priorities.
In a column published by The Journal Gazette in October 2007, Henry wrote that his decision to run for mayor came from a desire to keep Fort Wayne a place where people want to raise their children and stay after they grow up.
“I believe that we are a city on the move,” he wrote. “A place filled with people who give their best every day. A front-porch community that understands what it takes to be a world-class competitor.”
Henry spent his political career working to improve Fort Wayne.
In the 1996 article while he was in his 12th year on City Council, he said there was one thing he’d like to be remembered as: “someone who tried to make a difference.”
