September 23, 2025 // FEATURE

Longtime Today’s Catholic Employee Leaves Mark of Faith

Don Clemmer

For Nearly a Century, Mark Weber Has Been a Godsend to Folks in Need of a Sign

Mark Weber might not be a personal acquaintance of every Catholic in the Fort Wayne area, but they can find his mark all over the place.

The “Thou Shalt Not Park” notice adorning the lot at St. Patrick Parish in Fort Wayne is one example. And guests to the Archbishop Noll Catholic Center downtown find their way from the parking garage to the lobby thanks to the guidance of Weber’s signs.

For 23 years, Weber’s work also embellished the pages of Today’s Catholic, where he served as ad designer during what for most people would have been their retirement years. Having turned 98 this September, Weber remains a beloved figure among diocesan staff, past and present, and the parishes he’s called home for many years. His life’s journey illustrates the gifts of faith, family, creativity, and humor blended together in one man.

Early Adventures

Born in Huntington in 1927, one of Weber’s early memories is of climbing to the top of the bell tower of St. Mary Church with his best friend, hanging their legs over the side, and looking out across the Huntington landscape. Weber lost his father at age 10, and as a boy, he delivered hats from his bike for the shop owned by his mother and staffed by his aunts and other women. Weber’s mother was also a lifelong friend of Bishop John F. Noll’s sister, who also served as the bishop’s secretary. As a result, Weber’s family got to spend summer weekends on the bishop’s island on Lake Sylvan, where Weber would serve Mass.

“I set kind of a record,” Weber says now, all these years later, noting that he has served Mass for every bishop of the diocese since, most recently for Bishop Rhoades at a midday Mass for staff at the Archbishop Noll Center.

After graduating from Huntington High School in 1945, he entered the Navy and served on the USS Patoka as a radio yeoman. As the war had ended and the ship’s mission was to refuel and repair minesweeper boats, Weber’s big feat was surviving on a ship of chronic smokers.

“I worked in the radio shack, and I was about the only nonsmoker in there,” he recalls. “The air was literally blue.”

Weber attended St. Norbert College in Wisconsin (1948-49) and Indiana University (1950-51), serving as a bellhop and later a desk clerk while in Bloomington. He met many visiting celebrities, including legendary actor Charles Laughton and former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

After a stint in the Air Force, Weber returned to Huntington in 1954, Weber would go to Lake Wawasee every weekend with a friend, and one night, they encountered a young CYO camp counselor named Madonna Linder.

“There was an attractive woman there on the beach,” Weber shared with Today’s Catholic. “She began splashing water on us – that kind of thing.” After getting her address through a friend, Weber wrote Donna a note asking if he could drive her home the next weekend. “The season was closing, so I did, and she ended up becoming Mrs. Weber.”

Man of Letters

Weber’s calling to art and graphic design emerged while he worked in a succession of silkscreen shops, “pushing a squeegee.”

He says, “I was more interested in the art end of it.” As it turned out, his eligibility under the G.I. Bill of Rights allowed him to move to Chicago to attend the Institute of Lettering and Design.

“When I lived in Chicago, I worked in another silkscreen shop, and in the meantime experienced fatherhood” with the birth of their daughter, Helen, he recalls.

“When we got married, I told Donna we’ll have four boys: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And we wound up with Helen, Elizabeth, Louise, and Tess – showing that God’s ways are not our ways.”

A growing family meant Weber and Donna’s return to Huntington, where he got a job at a sign company, lettering trucks and the like. But his creativity ultimately branched out into a business of his own, keeping a studio in town and bringing his work home, as it were.

“We were always surrounded by artwork,” Weber’s daughter, Tess Steffen, recalls. “Dad painted a mural of the Holy Family traveling with a pregnant Mary on the back of a donkey on kind of a barren landscape in the entrance of our house on Fairfield.” She also remembers a quote her dad lettered over the fireplace. It read, “The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.” The family still quotes it on occasion.

Weber’s daughter, Lou Weber, says her dad was unflinchingly supportive. She recalls:

“He reminded us repeatedly that women could do anything. He was influential in pushing my sisters and myself into opportunities as soon as they opened for women – being commentators and readers at Mass, applying to Notre Dame as students, and, in my case, applying to work for Wildcat Baseball and being one of the first women to do so.”

His daughters also remember that Weber always had paint on his shoes and pants. When they’d be leaving for a wedding or other special event, their dad would always be scrambling to find a paint-free pair.

Another tradition of the Weber girls’ childhood was their dad’s multilingual countdown to Christmas. Each year, he would hang a large banner across the front of their house on Pembroke Lane.

“It would spell out ‘Merry Christmas’ in a different language every year,” Tess recalls. “He would paint one letter a day, and it would end on Christmas Eve.”

The Webers would then throw a Christmas party with food associated with that year’s language and culture. Japanese was a particular hit. Each letter on the Christmas banner was about 2 feet high, and, as they remember it, the only mishap occurred one year when young Tess slipped while holding the bottom of her dad’s ladder. It ended up crashing through their living room window with Weber, brush still in hand, attached to it.

“It was a real induction into the art world when you were selected to paint one of the letters,” Tess notes, despite the window incident.

Not All Business

During this time, Weber’s sign business took off, and a spectrum of clients ensured a robust stream of work. Big accounts included the Three Rivers Festival, Glenbrook Mall, Fort Wayne National Bank, and big sports vacation and boat shows at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum.

For Glenbrook, Weber had to paint the logo on the ice of the rink the mall had installed. This involved painting a logo on tissue paper on one layer of ice before a second layer of ice was applied. He remembers, “We knelt on cardboard to handle it on the ice, and it was mighty cold.”

“He had to be creative and come up with ways to design these projects and unusual requests that people had,” Tess recalls, “and sometimes we kids got to ride on a float or be in a photo or something like that as models. It was kind of a family affair.”

During this time, Weber kept an art studio above Mr. Coney on South Clinton Street, meaning the place constantly smelled of onions. When Weber began submitting humorous dispatches to a Detroit-based radio program hosted by Bud Guest, the tag that he went by was “above the onion bin.”

“A lot of Fort Wayne people listened to that show and would communicate to me that they had heard my letter,” Weber recalls. He kept a fridge of cold Cokes and frozen Heath bars in the studio for guests and encouraged every visitor to adorn the walls with a written message or express themselves artistically.

One frequent guest was Jim Saul, who worked in the marketing services department at Essex, where they utilized Weber’s services almost weekly.

“After we finished our business for the day, Mark would announce that it was time for an Altar Society meeting,” Saul recalls. “Somehow Mark had acquired the original altar from St. John the Baptist and moved it to his studio.”

Weber would get a couple Budweisers from his fridge and stand around the altar with friends, who would engage in philosophical conversations and listen to him tell stories about family, friends, Archbishop Noll, Notre Dame, and other subjects.

“There is nothing like a Mark Weber joke!” says Saul, who also keeps a book of Weber’s poetry that he cannot currently find in his junk room. He adds, “Even to this day, when our friend Tom Humbrecht and I visit him, his wealth of knowledge is seemingly endless.”

As to the origin of the creative spark that has fueled so much of his output, business and personal, Weber doesn’t overthink it.

“My mind is inclined that way, toward the imagination,” he says, though he does credit his time spent in business marketing and advertising. “I just seem to have good ideas that solve the problem.”

Making His Mark

In more recent decades, Weber kept an art studio in the basement of the long-closed school of St. Patrick Church in Fort Wayne, where he also attended daily Mass. The arrangement was that he would do artwork for the parish in exchange for the space. But that wasn’t the only church work that came Weber’s way as he entered his 70s. It began with an invitation from the diocesan newspaper’s then-business manager, Dee Dee Dahm.

“I did a couple of ads for Today’s Catholic, and Dee Dee liked them, and she asked me if I’d like to be on the staff,” Weber remembers.

Today’s Catholic’s offices were then located in the old friary building of Bishop Luers High School.

“I treasured the 17 years I worked alongside Mark Weber at Today’s Catholic,” says Tim Johnson, a former editor of the paper. “I came to deeply value his wit and wisdom. His one-liners and quick humor could cut through the stress of deadline days and bring laughter to the office.”

Johnson names as a favorite memory hearing Weber saying to Donna, “If I hadn’t married you, I’d be a monsignor by now!” But while Weber may have many priestly qualities, Johnson says, he is above all a wonderful father, someone he, too, has turned to and who has been there for him during rough times in life.

“His daughters’ love for him speaks volumes,” Johnson says.

Weber’s daughter, Tess, joined the staff of Today’s Catholic in 2006 (while this writer was serving at the paper as assistant editor). They worked together for 10 years.

“I sold ads, and he designed the ads. It was a good partnership,” she says.

Three of Weber’s daughters have homes within walking distance of where he lived until he was 97. Weber lost his wife in 2018 and relocated to St. Anne’s Community in Fort Wayne in the past year. He still attends daily Mass and says of the examples of his work still sprinkled throughout the community, “It’s just like breadcrumbs.”

And despite all the different languages he employed through the years for his house’s annual Christmas banner, Weber sees his learning as still unfinished.

“At my age, I spend a lot of time wondering what the next world is like,” Weber says. “And it has been said that human language cannot describe heaven. I’m looking forward to that language that can describe it.”

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98 Years of Family Reunions

When Weber was still a baby in the womb, two of his aunts took a vacation to Europe and prayed for him and his mother at every shrine along the way. When they returned, they gathered during Labor Day weekend with their siblings (nine of them in total) to share photos from the trip. That month, Weber was born, and so was the Metzger family reunion. Since his birth, Weber has attended 98 of them, playing a central leadership role, and the gathering has grown from nine siblings to more than 250 people, always coming together during the Labor Day holiday.

“We have written songs about the Metzger reunion, and it’s a great tradition within our family,” Weber says.

Weber’s daughter, Lou, says: “Some of my earliest memories are being on stage with my three sisters for the talent show at the reunion beginning at age 3 or 4. We sang ‘Me and My Shadow’ one of those early years and ‘Hello, Dolly!’ another, complete with costumes, my mother playing the piano, and my dad serving as emcee for the show,” Lou remembers. “My dad was the cultural glue that held us together, as he helped us maintain traditions while telling jokes, setting the tone, and making people feel welcome and comfortable.”

Weber’s daughter, Tess Steffen, says that, since family members would be arriving at the camp for the reunion well into the late hours of the first night, her dad would draw light-reflecting signs for the cars venturing through the dark to their destination. She sees the signs as reflective also of Mark Weber’s role in his family through the years: “always pointing the way.”