Turning Rust to Gold is an economic development thriller that is also, paradoxically, the love story of a community.

Turning Rust to Gold: Fort Wayne's Fight for Revival is the gripping, true story of a community struggling to rebound from a long, hard fall dating from the 1970s. Real people, tics and warts and all, appear in these pages, sometimes operating at cross purposes with others, sometimes banding together in hopes of making major changes for the better. There are angry meetings and exhilarating celebrations. A leading organization almost declares virtual war on City Hall and then suddenly retreats. Sweeping the conflict under the rug, however, just makes things worse. There's plenty of trouble to come, full of wily chess moves by competing civic grandmasters, and the occasional big surprise. Yet all the sound and fury signifies something. These people, to a person, on all sides, care about Fort Wayne.

Turning Rust to Gold is an economic development thriller that is also, paradoxically, the love story of a community. People are passionate about Indiana's second city. They are willing to fight for it and some of them do. Their enormous communal effort, with a handful of outstanding leaders, appears headed slowly, circuitously, toward success. Fort Wayne, with its flawed and wonderful people, is rich in lessons for those in any place or time who believe they can do something amazing for their home town.

Chris Mead is a consultant to chambers of commerce and companies that serve them. For 16 years he was the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives, retiring as senior vice president at the end of 2018. He is the author of Magicians of Main Street: America and its Chambers of Commerce (1768-1945). This book, receiving favorable comments from such groups as The Wall Street Journal and Washington Examiner, urban expert Joel Kotkin, and leading professors at Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, and the University of Southern California, is the only full-length history of the activity of chambers of commerce in the United States. He holds a B.A. degree in English from Oberlin College and an MBA from Stanford University.