1915 — “We Want The Weekly to Reach Every Alumnus” reads a headline in the 1915 Commencement edition. An annual subscription costs $3, but PAW will offer classes a half-price discount, provided that the class pays for subscriptions to go to the entire class. Business manager Whitney Darrow 1903’s “universal subscription plan” is quickly adopted by the classes and remains in place (with modest revisions) for more than 100 years.

1925 — Edwin M. “Ted” Norris 1895, PAW’s longest-serving editor, dies on April 18 after spending 21 years in the job. Norris created the student-written column “Undergraduate Week” (predecessor to today’s “Student Dispatch”), among other enduring features in the magazine. “Probably no other Princeton alumnus has ever had so wide a Princeton acquaintance,” his memorialists wrote, “and Ted Norris’ acquaintances were all his friends.”

1931 — “For everybody’s good, even his own, the coon-skinned-coated, hip-flasked, joy-riding type of undergraduate has disappeared,” writes Christian Gauss, the dean of the college and eminent scholar of literature, in a Sept. 25 PAW column titled “Boom Times Are Over.” The Great Depression, Gauss argues, has encouraged students to recognize the true value of a college education, and “many of them are making heroic sacrifices” to pursue their degrees, with uncertain job prospects ahead.

1940 — While reading PAW’s Dec. 9 issue, F. Scott Fitzgerald 1917 suffers a fatal heart attack in Los Angeles, shortly after making notes in the margins of a story about the football team’s recently completed season. His brief compliment — “good prose” — was, in the view of Fitzgerald historian Anne Margaret Daniel *99, evidence that the author’s “interest in good writing by others was constant.”

1941-45 — Wartime departures take their toll on the campus press. In February 1943, The Daily Princetonian suspends publication, and a month later, the University Press Club disbands. PAW endures, publishing slimmer issues under the direction of acting editor Frederick Osborne 1924. Cover photos include the Naval Training School exams at the University Gym (April 23, 1943) and student soldiers departing campus for weekend leave (Dec. 17, 1943).

1951 — Princeton football coverage, a PAW staple from the magazine’s earliest days, enjoys a golden era that includes back-to-back undefeated seasons (1950 and 1951) and the Tigers’ first Heisman Trophy winner, Dick Kazmaier ’52. In the Nov. 2 issue, Donald C. Stuart ’35 describes Kazmaier’s game against Cornell, which included five touchdowns (two rushing, three passing), as “the finest individual performance in Princeton’s 82 years of football.”

1960 — In a lecture about her experience teaching at Princeton, published as an essay in the Sept. 23 issue, sociologist and visiting professor Jesse Bernard highlights the University’s “anti-feminist tradition” and the hostility she has encountered as an instructor. Bernard insists she does not take the behavior of her students personally: “A sociologist does not look upon sociological phenomena in these terms. It would be as absurd as becoming angry at the snow or the rain.”

1968 — PAW devotes its entire Sept. 24 edition to “The Education of Women at Princeton,” also known as the Patterson Report, the University’s study of “the desirability and feasibility” undergraduate coeducation. The topic is hotly debated in letters to PAW. When the Board of Trustees approves coeducation in January 1969, PAW writes, current students are not surprised; the common view is that the trustees have endorsed “an inevitability.”

1977 — With rising printing costs straining the class treasuries that pay for alumni subscriptions, PAW adapts its schedule to publish biweekly from September to July, trimming the number of issues per year from 28 to 21. Editor Charles Creesy ’65 makes the announcement in the May 9 issue, adding that the magazine has “no intention of changing the name of the Princeton Alumni Weekly or giving up our acronym PAW.”

1998 — In its February feature on young entrepreneurs, PAW highlights the work of a Seattle-based alum who has “wowed Wall Street” and readers alike with his innovative online bookstore: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos ’86. “I still buy half of my books from regular bookstores,” Bezos tells PAW. “It’s a different experience. I think both methods are going to continue to do extremely well.”

2000 — New century, new look: As PAW begins its 101st publication year, the magazine debuts a new design, including a stylized, interlocking P-A-W logo on the cover. Readers call the logo “silly,” “awful,” “ghastly,” and “inexcusably tacky” in letters published the following month (there’s also one that dubs it “dazzling”). A year later, the logo’s size is reduced significantly, and it remains on the cover through July 2013.

2021 — The University and the Princeton Alumni Weekly sign a “memorandum of understanding” outlining the future of the publication. Under the agreement, which PAW board chair Marc Fisher ’80 summarizes in a letter to readers, Princeton will take on full responsibility for funding the magazine, but PAW will keep its editorial independence and remain, in Fisher’s words, “a lively, thoughtful forum for reporting, opinion, and argument about the best damn place of all.”