JS
Moderator
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2011
- Messages
- 2,001
- Reaction Score
- 9,695
With sadness we note the passing of Frank Buchwalder about a year ago, news that we missed at the time.
Francis Buchwalder Obituary - (2020) - Milford, CT - Connecticut Post
Under his main handle of Wonkster, Frank was one of the most impactful Boneyarders for many years. Of course he couldn’t resist using other handles as well, an anarchic practice that was then informally allowed and gave him literary license to play off his own ideas.
I first came to the board in the late 90’s, when Frank was already a board institution, and I posted some stuff that caused him to want to meet me. He lived in nearby Westport at the time, so we had lunch.
From there we developed a friendship based on several things -- love of UConn women’s basketball and love of words being most prominent. Frank pursued a decades-long project of writing his own dictionary, and he was a fiendishly accomplished Scrabble player.
The first time he showed up at my door to play Scrabble, though I considered myself no slouch with words, I had a premonition of doom. He placed several handwritten notebooks of good Scrabble words on the table and announced they were for consultation in case I challenged his plays.
A single dictionary wasn’t good enough, he said, because his house rules (imposed at my house) required allowing any word that appears in any dictionary anywhere. To an opponent, it felt like bringing a pop-gun to a fight and finding yourself staring down the mouth of a bazooka.
Believe me, I savored my very occasional Scrabble wins over him, which literally involved the luck of the draw.
Frank was an incessant talker. We had him over for a holiday dinner once, and it was the only time I saw my mother, one of the two or three most loquacious persons on the East Coast, reduced to silence in the face of an onslaught of verbosity. (Said she, “He certainly does talk, doesn’t he?”)
As for basketball, we started driving to games together, along with Nuzzi for a time, and Frank introduced me to HuskyNan. A few years later, when I became a mod, it was quickly apparent that Frank commanded outsized attention. He wasn’t the biggest board villain (we had a couple of doozies around at the time), or a villain at all, but he had a relentless instinct for envelope pushing.
We had an eventual falling out over an issue that managed to push aside our common interests, which is the reason for one of our most important board rules. For the past few years he didn’t post and several Boneyarders failed in their attempts to reach him by private message or emails.
His intelligence, and especially his humor, will be, and have been, missed.
RIP, Wonkster. You were a trip, and I mean that in a very good way.
Francis Buchwalder Obituary - (2020) - Milford, CT - Connecticut Post
Under his main handle of Wonkster, Frank was one of the most impactful Boneyarders for many years. Of course he couldn’t resist using other handles as well, an anarchic practice that was then informally allowed and gave him literary license to play off his own ideas.
I first came to the board in the late 90’s, when Frank was already a board institution, and I posted some stuff that caused him to want to meet me. He lived in nearby Westport at the time, so we had lunch.
From there we developed a friendship based on several things -- love of UConn women’s basketball and love of words being most prominent. Frank pursued a decades-long project of writing his own dictionary, and he was a fiendishly accomplished Scrabble player.
The first time he showed up at my door to play Scrabble, though I considered myself no slouch with words, I had a premonition of doom. He placed several handwritten notebooks of good Scrabble words on the table and announced they were for consultation in case I challenged his plays.
A single dictionary wasn’t good enough, he said, because his house rules (imposed at my house) required allowing any word that appears in any dictionary anywhere. To an opponent, it felt like bringing a pop-gun to a fight and finding yourself staring down the mouth of a bazooka.
Believe me, I savored my very occasional Scrabble wins over him, which literally involved the luck of the draw.
Frank was an incessant talker. We had him over for a holiday dinner once, and it was the only time I saw my mother, one of the two or three most loquacious persons on the East Coast, reduced to silence in the face of an onslaught of verbosity. (Said she, “He certainly does talk, doesn’t he?”)
As for basketball, we started driving to games together, along with Nuzzi for a time, and Frank introduced me to HuskyNan. A few years later, when I became a mod, it was quickly apparent that Frank commanded outsized attention. He wasn’t the biggest board villain (we had a couple of doozies around at the time), or a villain at all, but he had a relentless instinct for envelope pushing.
We had an eventual falling out over an issue that managed to push aside our common interests, which is the reason for one of our most important board rules. For the past few years he didn’t post and several Boneyarders failed in their attempts to reach him by private message or emails.
His intelligence, and especially his humor, will be, and have been, missed.
RIP, Wonkster. You were a trip, and I mean that in a very good way.
Last edited:
It was a fierce rivalry back then and Frank had some choice asides for the more aggressive RU fans that had me in stitches. He had a cutting humor that would leave the victim sliced and diced but his humor was at such a high intelligence level the victim was never quite sure he’d been insulted.
