To the Editor:

I have received word that my son, Christopher Reeve, has been selected to the 2012 New Jersey Hall of Fame. Other winners in the Arts & Entertainment Category are Michael Douglas and Sarah Vaughn. Princeton author Joyce Carol Oates is the sole winner in the General Category. Formal induction will take place June 3 at the New Jersey Arts Center in Newark.

This is a great honor, and I wish to express my deep appreciation and gratitude to the many friends to whom I mentioned the fact of his nomination and invited their vote on line before the December 31 deadline, as well as to the readers of Town Topics who read my earlier letter about his nomination and took the time and trouble to vote for him.

Chris’s roots in New Jersey are deep and varied. He began school in kindergarten at the Nassau Street School, transferring to the former Princeton Country Day School (PCD) in fourth grade, graduating in 1970 from Princeton Day School (PDS), where he sang with the Madrigal Group and was goalie for the varsity hockey team. He played Pee-Wee Hockey and Little League baseball as a youngster here, had his first horseback riding lessons at Hasty Acres in Kingston, learned to sail a boat on the Manasquan River in Bay Head and to fly a plane at Princeton Airport. At age eight he asked for piano lessons and began studying piano with the late John Diehlenn, a near neighbor of ours when we lived on Campbelton Circle.

His earliest acting experience seems to have been playing the Prince in a first or second grade classroom rendition of the Cinderella story, but his love of acting was nurtured in leading roles in just about every play or musical produced at PCD and at PDS, all directed by his great mentor, the late Herbert McAneny. The summer after his ninth grade year, he attended a theater workshop for teenagers held at Lawrenceville School, which brought in professionals from New York to teach technical aspects of acting and stagecraft.

Well before he left for college at Cornell, Chris was drawn to McCarter Theatre and occasionally given bit parts in its productions. He also played roles in musicals staged at McCarter by PJ&B (Princeton Junction and Back), founded and directed by the late Milton Lyon, whose aim was to give amateur thespians in Princeton the experience of working with professionals in a professional setting.

Much later it was the Kessler Rehabilitation Center in West Orange to which Chris was sent following hospitalization in Virginia for the neck injury he sustained in a horseback riding competition that rendered him a paraplegic.

I am very grateful to Princeton, as was Chris, for the important role this town and its institutions and organizations played in his development. I thank everyone who voted for him for this honor, which seems especially fitting. Chris would have been pleased.

Barbara L. Johnson

Wilton Street