March 24, 2021

Noting Appreciation of 75th Anniversary Issue and Creative Sports Caption Writer

To the Editor:

I thoroughly enjoyed your 75th anniversary issue and its glances at Princeton “back in the day.” I was especially intrigued to learn that there was an A & P Market where CVS is now. When I first moved here in 1967 that space was a Davidson’s Market and I assumed, for some reason, that it had pretty much always been Davidson’s. For the record I lived directly behind Davidson’s on Park Place where my rent for a one-bedroom apartment was $125 and I paid $5 to park in the municipal lot for, not two hours, but for a month!  I am now motivated to visit the library and look up some of the original issues of Town Topics that the library has on microfilm (whatever that is!) so that I can see just what merchants were in which locations around town in, say, the fifties.

I’d like to send a special appreciation to your sports caption writer who somehow manages — week after month after year — to devise original descriptions of the action shown by local athletes. And always in the same format: name followed by verb followed by noun. Some recent examples include: heads to the hoop, delivers a serve, handles the ball, controls the puck, pressures a foe, shows his form, thwarts a foe, and my favorite — displays defensive integrity. That writer deserves a special place in caption Heaven. I shudder to think, however, what the captions would sound like if this person was ever reassigned to write obituaries!

Keep up the fine work as I look forward to many more issues arriving with a gentle thud on my front steps each Wednesday.

Les Seifer
Chestnut Street

Editor’s note: Sports Editor Bill Alden is the mastermind behind the endlessly creative sports photo captions.