News Release

Frazier Arms Museum curator dies
Karcheski praised for his expertise

No one better embodied what the Frazier Museum was all about better than Walter "Chip" Karcheski, Jr., the Chief Curator of Arms and Armor. He had an insatiable thirst for knowledge and a passion for sharing history. Chip passed away on April 5, 2006, and will be greatly missed by the entire Frazier Museum community. The Museum's flag will be at half mast and a memorial service will be held at 1:30PM, Sunday, April 9 at Pearson's Funeral Home at 149 Breckenridge Lane.

Walter J. "Chip" Karcheski Jr., curator of the Frazier Historical Arms Museum in Louisville, died Wednesday in Rochester, Minn., after a brief illness. He was 54.

"I just don't recall a time when I wasn't interested in arms and armor," Karcheski told The Courier-Journal in 2003.

Karcheski was the first person hired by museum founder Owsley Brown Frazier, who recruited him in 2001.

"He was very much a key player in this project," the museum's executive director, Ed Webb, said yesterday.

"He was quite a jewel to have here," Webb added. "He was an absolutely brilliant individual. The museum world just lost one of its best ever."

Karcheski earned a master's degree in history from Worcester (Mass.) State College and began his career cleaning out the basement at the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester -- the only other specialized arms museum in the country.

Before he finished his bachelor's degree, he was the Higgins' chief curator, a position he held nearly 20 years before helping to establish the Frazier.

He had traveled the world doing research -- consulting with the likes of the Art Institute of Chicago and the History Channel, writing exhibition catalogs for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and cataloging arms at the Royal Armouries in London.

Karcheski's international research and experience with the Royal Armouries was vital to the partnership between the Frazier Historical Arms Museum and the British museum.

"My two passions in life are education and historical arms," Karcheski told The Courier-Journal. A year before the Louisville museum opened to the public in 2004, he described its mission: teaching history through changes in weaponry.

"He took the museum to a different level," Webb said of Karcheski's vision. Other museums are looking to the Frazier museum as a model, particularly the way that displays are brought to life and appear to be works of art, he said. "That's a true compliment to Chip."