Chris Welles | Business reporter, 72

Chris Welles, 72, an award-winning business reporter and former director of a fellowship program at Columbia University for business writers, died June 19 of Alzheimer's disease at a nursing home in Salisbury, Conn. He had lived in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Calling him "probably the premier business writer" from the 1960s to the early 1980s, Steven Shepard, a former editor of Business Week, said Mr. Welles was known for his penetrating accounts of "shenanigans, abuses, and downfalls" in the business community.

In 1975, Mr. Welles wrote The Last Days of the Club. The book, considered a classic in its field, detailed the demise of the old Wall Street monopoly and the rise of new institutions that would eventually dominate financial power in America. His 1970 book, The Elusive Bonanza, accused the oil industry of neglecting the development of America's vast oil-shale reserves.

In 1977, Mr. Welles was named director of the prestigious Walter Bagehot Fellowship Program in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia University (now the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship Program).

Mr. Welles worked for Life magazine, Business Week, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Among his awards for business reporting were a Gerald Loeb Award and a National Magazine Award. He ran the Bagehot program until 1985. - N.Y. Times News Service