In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit

No. 99-1526

Central Laborers’ Pension, Welfare

and Annuity Funds,

Plaintiffs-Appellees,

v.

Ted Griffee, d/b/a Midwest Landscape

Design and Construction,

Defendant-Appellant.

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.

No. 96 C 6702--James B. Zagel, Judge.

Argued September 27, 1999--Decided December 28, 1999

 Before Posner, Chief Judge, and Ripple and Rovner,

Circuit Judges.

 Posner, Chief Judge. This appeal presents issues

concerning service of process. The plaintiffs, a

trio of affiliated multiemployer ERISA plans (a

defined-benefit pension plan, a definedcontribution pension plan, and a welfare plan)

for construction employees in Illinois, brought

suit against a contractor named Griffee to

recover some $29,000 in delinquent contributions,

which if recovered were to be allocated among the

three plans. The complaint was filed in October

of 1996. In September of the following year,

having failed to serve Griffee, the funds asked

the district judge to dismiss their suit without

prejudice, and he did so. Why they wanted to

dismiss their suit is unclear; they didn’t intend

to abandon their efforts to collect the

delinquent contributions, and they could have

asked the judge for additional time within which

to serve the defendants. Fed. R. Civ. P. 4(m);

Troxell v. Fedders of North America, Inc., 160

F.3d 381 (7th Cir. 1998). They told us at

argument that they felt that the district judge

would prefer not to have an aging, inactive case

on his docket.

 By a curious coincidence, the very day after the

suit was dismissed the summons and complaint in
the now defunct suit were served upon Mr. Griffee

by an official of one of the local unions whose

members (including the official) are participants

in the plans. A month later the plans moved the

district court to reinstate their suit nunc pro

tunc, backdating the reinstatement to the day on

which the suit had been dismissed. And a month

after that they filed a motion for entry of a

default judgment. When Griffee, to whom they

mailed a copy of the motion, did not respond to

it, the judge granted the motion and entered

judgment in the amount sought. Some months later,

after the plaintiffs began efforts to collect the

judgment, Griffee moved the court to vacate the

default judgment as void, Fed. R. Civ. P.

60(b)(4); Swaim v. Moltan Co., 73 F.3d 711, 717-

18 (7th Cir. 1996), on the ground that service

had been improper, not only because the suit had

been dismissed before service was made but also

because service had been made by a person who had

a financial stake in the litigation.

 A judgment is void if the court issuing it does

not have jurisdiction over the defendant, e.g.,

Hanson v. Denckla, 357 U.S. 235, 249-50 (1958);

In re Crivello, 134 F.3d 831, 838 (7th Cir.

1998); Koehler v. Dodwell, 152 F.3d 304, 306-07

(4th Cir. 1998), and it does not if the defendant

is not served, e.g., Rogers v. Hartford Life &

Accident Ins. Co., 167 F.3d 933, 940 (5th Cir.

1999); LSJ Investment Co. v. O.L.D., Inc., 167

F.3d 320, 324 (6th Cir. 1999), unless he waives

service or makes an appearance in the case

without reserving an objection to jurisdiction.

Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(h); Ruhrgas AG v. Marathon Oil

Co., 119 S. Ct. 1563, 1570 (1999); Koehler v.

Dodwell, supra, 152 F.3d at 306. When Griffee was

served in the initial lawsuit, that suit had been

dismissed. A new suit (or reinstated old suit--

the difference, of no moment here because there

is no statute of limitations issue, is only

whether the plaintiffs had to pay a second filing

fee, Central States, Southeast & Southwest Areas

Pension Fund v. Lady Baltimore Foods, Inc., 960

F.2d 1339, 1346 (7th Cir. 1992)) was filed, but

was never served, and so the court never acquired

jurisdiction over the defendant. Hence the Rule

60(b)(4) motion should have been granted.

 It is no answer that by granting the order of

reinstatement nunc pro tunc the district judge

brought the original suit back to life as of the

day that Griffee was served, which was the day

after that suit had been dismissed in order to

keep the judge’s docket pristine. As we have

reminded the district courts time and again, the

only proper office of a nunc pro tunc order is to

correct a mistake in the records; it cannot be

used to rewrite history. E.g., Transamerica Ins.

Co. v. South, 975 F.2d 321, 325-26 (7th Cir.

1992); United States v. Daniels, 902 F.2d 1238,
1240 (7th Cir. 1990); King v. Ionization Int’l,

Inc., 825 F.2d 1180, 1188 (7th Cir. 1987). If the

suit had been dismissed on September 12 (the day

after service), but the court’s docket sheet had

erroneously recorded the date of dismissal as

September 10, then an order correcting the record

as of the date of entry would have been proper.

But there was no mistake to be corrected. The

original suit really was dismissed on September

10, the day before service.

 We are not being formalists. Griffee was not

represented by counsel, and if having been served

on September 11 he had called the clerk of the

district court to find out what this was all

about, he would have been told that it was about

nothing, because the suit had been dismissed.

There is no indication, incidentally, that he had

been trying to evade service; the plaintiffs’

lawyer could not explain to us why they had taken

so long to serve him.

 The district judge brushed aside Griffee’s

objection to the server merely by observing that

Fed. R. Civ. P. 4(c)(2) says that "service may be

effected by any person who is not a party and who

is at least 18 years of age" and the union

official who served Griffee was not a party to

the litigation. The observation is correct but

misses the point. When a suit is brought by a

fiduciary, his beneficiary, while not a named

party, is the real party in interest, e.g., Riggs

Nat’l Bank v. Zimmer, 355 A.2d 709, 713-14 (Del.

Ch. 1976), and it would be curious, to say the

least, to have service performed by a real party

in interest. It would be in the interest of that

party to flush the summons and complaint down the

toilet, execute an affidavit of service, and move

for a default judgment.

 In the case of a pension or welfare fund--a

trust, but one with thousands of participants and

beneficiaries--the financial stake of a

participant will often be too attenuated to

present a serious risk of a real conflict of

interest. One of the plans is a defined-benefit

plan, which means that the interest of Mr. Downs

(the official who served Griffee) is fixed and

does not depend on the assets of the plan, Hughes

Aircraft Co. v. Jacobson, 119 S. Ct. 755, 761

(1999), and another is a defined-contribution

plan to which the money sought from Griffee is

irrelevant because he is not Downs’s employer.

But in pointing out these things the plaintiffs

ignore the facts that there is a third plan, a

welfare plan that may for all we know be

unfunded; that defined-benefit plans can go broke

and when they do the insurance provided by the

Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is limited,

Commonwealth Edison Co. v. Vega, 174 F.3d 870,
874 (7th Cir. 1999); Jay Conison, Employee

Benefit Plans in a Nutshell 430 (2d ed. 1998);

and that in the event the plans (or one or two of

them) are liquidated, their assets may be

distributed in whole or part to participants such

as Mr. Downs.

 We need not pursue the issue of service by a

trust beneficiary further. The question whether

"party" in Rule 4(c)(2) might include a real

party in interest that is not a named party is

interesting, but also esoteric (we cannot find

any cases discussing it), as most trustees know

better than to use their beneficiaries as their

process servers; and it is not squarely posed

here, first because the default judgment must be

set aside anyway and second because Griffee does

not deny that he was served. If receipt of

service is conceded, we suppose it would not

matter if the server were a two-month old

orangutan. All that is conceded, however,

recurring to the first point, is the receipt of

service in a defunct case, and that is not enough

to confer jurisdiction over a case later filed or

revived.

 The judgment is reversed with instructions to

vacate the default judgment.

Reversed.