Hopping into Tom Castaldi’s little gray Chevy pickup truck for a ride around downtown Fort Wayne is a little like stepping into a time machine.

Castaldi doesn’t see the city the way most folks do. Yes, he’s got one eye on traffic – but the other is often on the past.

Rounding the corner onto Columbia Street’s restaurant block from Calhoun Street, Castaldi doesn’t see a place to go hang out with friends on Friday after work or a spot for a Cajun-style dinner.

Instead, he points to a brick building on the northeast corner. “That’s where the building Thomas Edison lived in when he lived in Fort Wayne used to be,” he says.

Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb? He lived in Fort Wayne? Really?

“Yes, really,” Castaldi says.

Doing what?

“He was a telegraph operator for the railroad. He only lived here for a short time, but the building he lived in was right there.”

And that is but a small fraction of the Fort Wayne history that Castaldi can summon at a moment’s notice, delivering it in a deep, resonant voice immediately recognizable to Monday morning listeners of Northeast Indiana Public Radio’s WBOI, which has aired his “On the Heritage Trail” snippets since 1994.

Gazing down the block, Castaldi points to a stone pillar across from its southern end. The pillar came from the former Rosemarie Hotel that occupied a spot on the south side of Columbia Street. The pillar stands on the site of the former Randall Hotel, he says – a tannery that became a luxury turn-of-the-20th-century spot that once boasted it was the best $2 hotel in Indiana.

“Of course, tanneries don’t smell that great. They had to use lye to remove the fur, and it had a very unpleasant odor, so I wonder what it must have smelled like back then,” he says.

Then Castaldi makes a quick turn down the snowy alley behind Columbia Street’s north side. To him, it’s not just today’s railroad overpass but also the route of the Wabash & Erie Canal, a main artery of commerce in the mid-19th century that linked the Great Lakes to the Ohio River.

“The interstate of its time,” he says. “You don’t think of docks when you think of Fort Wayne, but that’s what was here. The backs of these buildings were actually the fronts. They all faced the canal.”

Indeed, Castaldi adds, a turnaround basin for the canal boats was located near the spot where Harrison and Superior streets meet, “a pond of water so large and deep that a 70- or 80-foot canal boat could turn around in it.”

In December, the 71-year-old Castaldi received the Eli Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Indiana Historical Society to someone who has done extraordinary work in the field of history over an extended period of time.

Now the officially appointed, if unpaid, Allen County historian, Castaldi has published three books on the Wabash & Erie and nearly 150 articles and museum scripts on local and regional history topics.

He served as the first board president of the Indiana State Museum Foundation and helped with the planning and exhibit information for the Carroll County Wabash & Erie Canal Interpretive Center in Delphi, which opened in 2003.

But when it comes to his historical projects, Castaldi is in full agreement with Edison, who once said: “I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun.”

“Marketing was my career path, but history was my passion path,” the retired advertising executive says.

Picking up the trail

A grandchild of 19th-century Italian immigrants, Castaldi says his love of the past started at a young age. He grew up in Logansport, where his family ran a neighborhood grocery. One of his earliest memories was of his father, Harry Castaldi, pointing out where the Wabash & Erie had once run through town.

He left high school thinking about being a history teacher but ended up majoring in business marketing at Indiana University. After college, he got married and took a job with Essex Wire Corp., moving to Fort Wayne in 1966, where he worked in an in-house ad agency. The job required him to travel back and forth between Fort Wayne and Logansport, where Essex had its division headquarters.

“With the 300 to 400 trips over the years – it got to where my car knew the way – I kept wondering why the highway was where it was, and I noticed ruins, highway, railroad tracks, and I figured there must be a canal in there somewhere. So that triggered my interest again,” he says.

After a stint at an ad agency in South Bend, Castaldi returned to Essex, where part of his job was government relations. That brought him into contact with state government, and he ended up on the board of the Indiana State Museum Foundation, later becoming president.

But a real turning point came in the early 1990s, when Fort Wayne was about to celebrate its bicentennial. He and his company got involved in a project to create a tour patterned after Boston’s Freedom Trail that would help residents and visitors understand the city’s historical spots.

The project became a book he edited, “On the Heritage Trail,” as well as the radio program, and later an expanded map that links historical spots by geography along five driving and walking routes.

The project broadened Castaldi’s knowledge beyond the canal – but he still says he’s more comfortable serving as an expert on canal history.

Still, it doesn’t stop him from pointing out a historical marker on the north side of the 300 block of East Berry Street for the now non-existent home of Mrs. Eliza George. The 19th-century woman became known as Mother George for caring for Union soldiers in hospitals during the Civil War after her son-in-law, Sino Bass, died during the war. She died at her post of typhoid fever, contracted from returning Confederate prisoners in Wilmington, N.C., in 1865.

“It’s one of my favorite Fort Wayne stories,” he says, after pointing out a sign carved on the side of Aaron’s Oriental Rugs on Broadway that reveals a street named in her honor and before navigating the snow-covered lanes of Lindenwood Cemetery to stop at her grave site.

Across from it stands a memorial to her son-in-law, who Castaldi says was the brother of the man who built the Bass mansion that became the University of Saint Francis and owned the grounds that became Lindenwood.

Feeding passion

When the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend celebrated 150 years in 2006, Castaldi broadened his knowledge again, writing “Historian Nostra,” a series of more than 100 radio spots on church history that runs on Redeemer Radio, WLYV-1450 AM.

“It’s not that I know a lot about history, but I know the people who do know history, and as you go on, you learn the importance of proper archiving and capturing the oral histories of people who experienced history in their lives,” says the father of five and grandfather of eight, who now serves as archives committee chairman for the Delphi canal center, helping to steer appropriate donations.

He also serves on the board and the fundraising committee of The History Center in Fort Wayne, which has been restoring its building’s former City Council chambers and courtroom to its high Victorian splendor.

When Castaldi retired from Essex as communications vice president in 1998, he decided to pursue history nearly full time. And he sees plenty of potential projects – possibly a couple of more books in his canal series, and developing a trail along the towpath and a series of markers that, “in a perfect world, would stretch the full length of the canal from Allen County to Evansville on the Ohio River.”

Lately, Castaldi has been getting more curious about a feeder route to the canal that ran through Fort Wayne.

On the way back from Lindenwood, he makes a quick left turn into the heart of the Nebraska neighborhood, stopping on Wheeler Street at the top of a small hill that overlooks the railroad tracks. He points to the spot that marks where the feeder, which provided water from the St. Joseph River to the main canal, joined it.

Though he can’t say for sure, he sees hints of the feeder in spots across town – in an oddly angled alley in the Nebraska neighborhood, in a building that now houses Bloodmoney tattoo shop on North Wells Street, in a house along Edna Street whose entrance doesn’t face the thoroughfare.

The Bloodmoney building’s north wall, for example, is built at an angle, perhaps to avoid encroaching on the feeder’s right-of-way, Castaldi says.

It’s documented, he adds, that the feeder line ran along the power lines to the west of Spy Run Avenue and through Johnny Appleseed Park.

“It’s so difficult to go back to the old maps, but why would this alley be positioned the way it is?” he wonders aloud.

Sometimes, history is as much about questions as answers, Castaldi says.

“I’ve always been sort of a collector of information as I went along, and I try to find the stories, not just ‘the facts,’ ” Castaldi says.

“It was just all those times traveling along in a car and wondering about a place – I guess that’s what it is (that motivates me). I’ve always felt more comfortable, no matter where I have been, more comfortable and enjoying myself more, knowing and understanding what the back story, what the history, was.”

rsalter@jg.net