CLASS OF 1964 | 2023 | SPRING ISSUE

Nick Puner penned a follow-up to David Skaggs’s note from the Fall Issue. He said, “Indeed, I did miss the POSH (the fictional law firm of Puner, Oleskey, Skaggs, and Howard) reunion at Jim Howard’s in June. But, nothing daunted, OSH insisted on another such event, this time at Steve Oleskey’s in Brookline. And so, it occurred, October 30 to November 2. Among our activities was a trip to the JFK Library and Museum. Oh, how that brief moment in our history, both of our youth and of our nation, still plucks at my heartstrings.  

“Somehow, we POSHies have stayed cohered—to the point where our next event is already incubating.”

Matthys Van Cort wrote a tribute to Chris Wallach, who died on June 4, 2022, in hospice in Orange Park, Florida. Matthys said, “Chris was an amazing human being. Brilliant, ever curious, incredibly funny, a wacky polymath. Although we were COL colleagues starting in the fall of 1961, I got to know Chris better only after I moved to the John Wesley Club in the fall of 1963. I had a six-string guitar and a couple of Lightin’ Hopkins records. Chris had a 12-string and introduced me to Lead Belly, Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Willie McTell, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and other blues greats.  

“After Wesleyan, he continued to read broadly. At our 30th Reunion in 1994, Chris was the only one, to my knowledge, who had actually read Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the book that lead to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa against him. Twenty years later Chris suggested that I might benefit from reading Epictetus.

“Chris and I had a number of adventures while we were at Wesleyan and then during several years after graduation, after which we were out of touch for a time. In his last years we emailed intensely if not steadily. I will miss him terribly.

“In 2017 Chris wrote to me:

‘I’ve spent a lifetime failing to find out what to do with a lifetime, and in the process have been a race-car mechanic, small business owner, software developer and programmer, data-logger inventor and manufacturer, and so on. I retired in 2004 for a liver transplant, and discovered in the years following that I wanted to be just an inventor and fiddle around with stuff.  I patented an idea for a wind turbine, but have sinfully procrastinated on finishing a working prototype. https://patents.google.com/patent/US8410622B1/en.

‘All in all, I find myself more content than I ever thought possible, proof again of the power of shit luck.’

“Bruce Kirmmse, CSS class of ’64, had been for years in very regular contact with Chris, including almost daily emails and Chris’s visits to Bruce’s summer house in New England. On June 4, 2022, Bruce wrote to tell me that Chris had died. Among other things, he said: ‘He was a good, witty, and thoughtful friend, and my life is seriously diminished without him. Chris had for some months been in a care facility in Orange Park, Florida.’”