Many nights at McCarter Theatre, in seat X112 — which is permanently reserved for him — you will find William W. Lockwood Jr., known to all and sundry as Bill. Bill Lockwood is McCarter’s longtime director of special programming.

   Mr. Lockwood doesn’t look like most people’s vision of a show business heavyweight — a Hollywood studio chief, portly, expensively dressed, smoking a cigar, a starlet on each arm, a raft of reporters in tow — but in his field, he’s a legend.

   The year Bill Lockwood started booking shows into McCarter, Eisenhower was president. Bill, a hometown boy, was a senior at Princeton University. Gas was 30 cents a gallon, the Dow topped at 584, color TV and stereos were the last word in home entertainment, classical pianist Van Cliburn became a national hero by winning the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, and Ricky Nelson scored the year’s No. 1 hit song with “Poor Little Fool.”

   The purpose of this little trip down Memory Lane is not to draw attention to Mr. Lockwood’s age (a fitness buff, the 71-year-old easily passes for 20 years younger), but to suggest how much times and tastes have changed since those halcyon days of 1958, and how successfully Mr. Lockwood has negotiated those changes. The fact is, Mr. Lockwood is very likely the only programmer in the United States still booking shows after the passage of 50 years — and booking them at the highest levels.

   At McCarter, which he describes as his home, Mr. Lockwood basically books everything except the plays the theater produces, Princeton University events, such as the Triangle Club’s annual extravaganza, and outside rentals that meet McCarter’s high standards, such as those by American Repertory Ballet and Opera New Jersey.

   In other words, all the music, dance, jazz, cabaret and world cultural events at McCarter are Mr. Lockwood’s doing, and, year after year, these feature some of the hottest and most happening artists available anywhere in America. For instance, one of the special events marking Mr. Lockwood’s golden anniversary season will be a recital Oct. 21 by Lang Lang, the Chinese pianist who, even before he was given star billing at the 2008 Olympics, had established himself as one of the most sought-after artists on the planet.

   How do you get someone like Lang Lang to play a mid-sized house in something other than a major city? Well, it’s who you know, what you’ve done, what your reputation is within the profession — so a little biographical background is in order.

   Starting out under the aegis of Sol Hurok (1888-1974), the legendary impresario who admired the gumption of the young Bill Lockwood, Mr. Lockwood joined Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 1965. Early on, he rose to the position of executive director of programming, where he was instrumental in the creation of the Mostly Mozart Festival, Great Performers at Lincoln Center, Lincoln Center’s Out-of-Doors and the Serious Fun Festival, and making them the successes — in fact, the international programming models — they became.

   By the time the New Jersey Performing Arts Center opened its doors in Newark in 1997, Mr. Lockwood was aboard as principal programming associate, a post he retains. And when the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts opened in Philadelphia, Mr. Lockwood was there to get Kimmel’s presentation series up and flying.

   Sitting in his small McCarter office — a repository of boxes, books, papers, all manner of memorabilia, plus a desk — Mr. Lockwood looks back on the days he was juggling McCarter, NJPAC and Kimmel and could book what he calls a “trifecta” — for example, Keith Jarrett in all three venues.

   ”There’s a certain synergy for me in wearing several hats, but I don’t play favorites. I do what’s right for the artist and the venue,” he says. “What happened with Keith was fun, but planning all those seasons nearly cost me my sanity. My salvation was e-mail. I was working three different calendars in three different time warps — right now, later in the season, and next season.”

   Generally speaking, programmers tend to be specialists — you call Dick for classical, Jane for dance, Tom for jazz, Sally for cabaret, Harry for world attractions. Mr. Lockwood does it all, and more. For instance, he’s a stone-cold film fanatic who describes the “Second Chance” film series he has been booking for the Princeton Adult School for 12 years as “a labor of love.” He keeps up “with all the arts activities on campus,” and serves as business manager of the Triangle Club and Princeton Summer Theater.

   ”I love working with students,” he says. “Since I don’t teach, it’s my only contact with them. It gives me a peek into what this generation is all about.”

   Describing himself as “a multi-disciplinarian,” Mr. Lockwood spends his days at his desk, and up to “five or six nights a week” attending performances — at McCarter, in Newark, sometimes in New Brunswick and Red Bank, but most of all, in New York City.

   ”I’m always interested in new programming, or if it’s an attraction I already know, in new repertory, to see if I want to bring that here. I try to see everything myself. Regardless of the CDs and DVDs I get, I need to hear and see the artist in person. These days, everybody has the Web site and the impressive press material. You could book a season from your armchair. But I want to see the artist in person.”

   It’s all about relationships, he says.

   ”There’s a trust and a loyalty that builds up, and our artistic standards speak for themselves. But it isn’t all my doing. They want to play here, they want to return because of the ambience at McCarter and the welcome they receive. We pamper them. Many come back even after their careers have outgrown a theater our size. Others are grateful we presented them before their careers took off.”

   He has booked just about everybody, it seems, and acts he cannot book at McCarter, due to their size and expense — orchestras, for example, and big dance companies — he can book in Newark.

   ”NJPAC’s size, more than anything else, dictates the difference between programming there and programming at McCarter. Twenty-eight-hundred seats is a lot of mouths to feed, so to speak,” he says. “But it’s a much bigger market. There are 4 million people within an easy drive of Newark. It’s a separate market. The model, the template, is completely different.”

   Mr. Lockwood, who gleefully confesses to being a Dead Head, not only attended about 100 Grateful Dead concerts, he had the pleasure of presenting his favorite band in 1971, back in the days when McCarter put on big rock and pop shows in Princeton University’s Dillon gym, later in Jadwin gym.

   The big rock shows survived open pot smoking among the Grateful Dead audience but not the audience for Bruce Springsteen. By jumping up and down on the seating, they ruined Jadwin’s basketball court.

   ”Getting ‘the Boss’ here (in 1978) was one of the triumphs of my career,” Mr. Lockwood says, “but I don’t miss doing those big shows. The artists were wonderful; their entourages were something else. I’ve had only two disasters in 50 years. The first was when we were representing Hurok in San Francisco. We were presenting the Bolshoi Ballet when the Cuban Missile Crisis broke out. Nobody came. The second was the morning after the Springsteen concert, when the university had me come down to Jadwin to look at the floor.”

   Artists he never booked that he wishes he had? “Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton, Neil Young. And Glenn Gould.”

   Mr. Lockwood lives quietly in a modest brick house in Princeton Township down the street from the house where he grew up, and where his mother, Virginia, 98, still resides. The lifelong bachelor shrugs, saying he would have made a poor husband and father, as he is “never home.” He plays tennis four or five times a week, and enjoys whitewater rafting, running and boating, when he can get up to the family vacation house on Casco Bay, outside Portland, Maine.

   ”Most of my free time April through October I spend in my garden,” says Mr. Lockwood, a Master Gardener of Mercer County. “I grow all my own veggies. And I have the best dahlias in Princeton.”

   He wants “SOLD OUT!” as his epitaph, he jokes.

   Back at McCarter, many nights, Mr. Lockwood isn’t sitting in X112, but pacing the back of the house. “The proof of the pudding for me as a presenter is, how is the performance working — is it successful?

   ”I watch for the communication between the artist and the audience. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s like taking the temperature of the event. Sometimes you can tell right away that the artist has got it, that the audience is in the palm of their hand. In back, you can catch the vibe. You can’t measure this, you can’t quantify it — but you know. You just know.”