Since it was April and the application deadline had already come and gone, Chris assumed he was applying for the subsequent year. He finished his freshman year at his local public high school and headed off to band camp, trombone in hand. At the end of his camp session, as he loaded his belongings into his mother’s car for the drive home, she made an announcement that would change Chris’ life and that he relates with characteristic good humor: “She said, ‘Phillips Exeter Academy called. They have a spot for you.’ And I said, ‘That’s interesting. I’ll think about it.’ She replied, ‘I’ve already told them you are coming.’”

Chris was delivered to Exeter as a new lower (on significant scholarship) in the fall of 1968, having never visited the campus. He was immediately besotted. “Imagine this,” Chris says, leaning forward and gesturing with an excitement that is palpable some 35 years later, “I’m heading to my very first class at Exeter, walking up the dished out marble stairs in the Academy Building. I find the classroom with this lozenge-shaped table in it and take a seat. Soon thereafter, a short, white-haired gentleman comes in with a blonde cocker spaniel in tow. He surveys the room, and says, ‘I’m glad to see you have all brought your Weeks-Adkins Algebra course books with you. Mr. Adkins and I are still getting royalties.’ The ‘Weeks’ in ‘Weeks-Adkins’ was the Arthur Weeks teaching the class. We were going to be taught by the guy who wrote the book! That realization was stunning, and the subsequent classes were different from and superior to anything I’d had before in school.”

After graduation, Chris headed to the University of Virginia to major in late-19th Century Existentialism and subsequently put his degree to good use by becoming an accountant, eventually settling in Seattle and starting a very successful real estate appraisal and counseling firm. He maintained his ties to Exeter through regional meetings and events, and by helping to establish the Exeter Association of Washington. Yet something was quietly nagging at Chris. “My business was doing well,” he says, “and I was intellectually stimulated by my work, but I just had this sense that I wanted to work in education. I knew I didn’t have the passion for one particular subject to be a great teacher. But my passion for independent secondary schools and the experience I had in working with individuals and families with high net worth and not-for-profit organizations suggested to me that I might be pretty effective at raising money. Plus, having witnessed first-hand the challenges of wealth in families, I felt comfortable talking to people about philanthropy.”

So, at age 45, and with the blessing and encouragement of his wife and children, Chris made a major career change and an equally major geographic change. The family relocated from Seattle to Connecticut, where Chris went to work in the development office of Salisbury School, eventually becoming director of development. A few years later, when an opportunity opened up at Exeter in the major gifts department, Chris knew the time had come to return home.

Wronsky served as a regional director of major gifts for the Academy from the spring of 2002 until the fall of 2003, when he was invited to become Exeter’s new director of planned giving, a job he describes as ideal for his skills and interests. In his new role, Chris works directly with individual alumni/ae, parents and class volunteers and with other major gift and annual fund officers on issues attendant to structured gifts. “In this day and age,” Chris says thoughtfully, “many of us don’t have a sense of a final home. The family cemetery plot tended to and visited by generations is pretty rare. Yet a named scholarship, teaching chair or other fund established through a planned giving vehicle will be here forever, and supports future generations of young men and women who seek an Exeter education. It’s the best legacy I can think of.”

Speaking of great legacies, Chris’ son, Zig, will begin his prep year at the Academy this fall.

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