Twenty-four years ago TIME'S editorial offices were in a remodeled brewery at 236 East 39th Street, Manhattan. Our editorial staff consisted of about six full-time editors (average salary: $25 a week) ; our working capital was touch & go; our circulation was about 25,000, and there was doubt in some quarters as to whether year-old TIME could survive.

At that time, in his capacity as circulation manager, Roy Larsen, now president of TIME, Inc., mailed a subscription offer to a list of potential TIME subscribers. Recently, 24 years late, one of these cards (see cuts) turned up in his mail. It had been posted a few days before by Henry Hubbard, of Maryland, N.Y. Curious to know how Mr. Hubbard had come by what is possibly TIME'S only surviving original subscription card and why he had chosen to send it in now, we dispatched a reporter to interview him, with the following result:

Maryland turned out to be a typical upstate rural community of some 300 people. Nobody knew how it got its name--especially in view of the fact that it was originally called Sperryville (after an early settler) when it was founded in 1795. It is on the line of the Delaware & Hudson Railroad, but the station at Maryland has been closed for some years. The postoffice, where everyone goes to get his mail, handles five copies of TIME for subscribers in the vicinity.

Henry Hubbard turned out to be a retired gardener living alone in an abandoned wooden Delaware & Hudson passenger coach (circa 1880) on the property of a local farmer named Douglas Spencer. Wrote TIME'S reporter: "Mr. Hubbard's home was originally fixed up by the local ticket agent here when Maryland was a station. It has a clear view of the main road (highway #7), and the rear of it overhangs a small gorge with a brook that makes a pleasant sound down deep through the undergrowth and tall trees. The grass is high in front, but beneath one window a rose bush planted long ago has managed to survive somehow."

Once he was satisfied that our reporter was not a traveling salesman, Mr. Hubbard was very cordial. A tall, thin, erect old man of 79, who survives his wife and all but one of their three children, he lives in a kind of careless disarray not unknown to anyone who has been a widower for 20 years. As for TIME'S subscription card, he could not recall when he originally got it, but he had had it around for many years. Coming upon it among his possessions while looking for something else, he had decided to send it in.

Although Henry Hubbard cannot, like the average TIME subscriber,*lay claim to an income of $7,500 a year, an automobile, a home of his own, four business suits, a college education, etc., he goes to more trouble than most TIME readers to get hold of his weekly copy. It reposes 12 miles away in the periodical room of the Oneonta, N.Y. public library. There, Mr. Hubbard, who says that he has always been "a great reader" although "I was born on a farm in Laurens township and quit school at 15," finds a full supply of his favorite newspapers and periodicals. He wishes, however, that it was not so far away because, when he cannot hitch a ride, it is a long walk for one of his years.

Henceforth, as far as TIME is concerned, Reader Hubbard need walk no farther for his weekly copy than the postoffice, where he now becomes TIME'S sixth subscriber in Maryland, N.Y.

*According to continued and extensive surveys TIME has made.

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