A Letter From The Publisher, Oct. 22, 1951

At booths 136 and 137 in the exhibit hall of the Minneapolis Municipal Auditorium, where the National Association of Retail Druggists held their 53rd annual convention this week, TIME’S representatives were playing a little game with visitors.

They awarded a silver dollar to anyone who could name a post office in the U.S. to which no subscription copies of TIME are sent.

There are 41,638 post offices in the nation. The druggists also saw subscription lists for their home towns, looked for their own names, those of their friends, and names of many of the most influential people they knew. (Needless to say, no one was permitted more than a hasty look at these jealously guarded lists.)

Although our “post office booth” has carried its half-ton of subscription lists to 89 conventions and trade meetings, this was only the second time prizes were offered for naming post offices not on the lists. The original plan was to offer prizes for naming counties to which no subscription copies are mailed. This idea was dismissed as patently unfair, because only four of the nation’s 3,070 counties could have qualified.

The first time was in July, at the Chicago convention of the National Association of Music Merchants. Typical of the winning guesses were the communities of Rough and Ready, Calif.; Goose Egg, Wyo.; Carp, Nev. and Hungry Horse, Mont. We turned out to be wrong about Hungry Horse, because we’d used some outdated Montana subscriber lists at our “post office” display. (Hungry Horse is on the lists used in Minneapolis this week.)

When word got back to the town that it had been chosen for such dubious distinction, Mel Ruder, 36, founder-editor of the Hungry Horse News, took immediate issue. Himself a consistent reader of TIME since the eighth grade, Ruder decided to conduct an investigation to learn whether Hungry Horse hungered for TIME treatment of the news.

What he learned and reported in his newspaper was this: “We checked and found that at least six copies of TIME arrive at the Hungry Horse post office each week. In addition, the magazine has newsstand sales in Hungry Horse,

and a number of … subscribers who live at Hungry Horse get their magazines through . . . Columbia Falls. TIME is doing all right.”

The town of Hungry Horse (pop. 1,300) is headquarters for a $108 million dam under construction by the Bureau of Reclamation (TIME, News in Pictures, Oct. 1). A check by us of the 40 TiME-subscribing families there disclosed that 30 get their copies from the nearby Columbia Falls post office, ten others from the third class post office at Hungry Horse.

Many others at Hungry Horse in addition to Ruder have been TIME-readers of long standing. Cableway Operator Ben Ostrom, 47, who controls tons of-concrete swinging in a huge bucket a quarter-mile across a canyon, said he has read TIME for 15 or 20 years, even borrowed copies of the Atlantic Edition from friends on a 1947 visit to Norway. Allen Johanneson, with six or seven TiME-reading years, has made a TIME convert of his ex-schoolteacher wife, Jan.

“Out here,” wrote Editor Ruder, “we don’t think of Hungry Horse as a strange name. After all, we had a construction company representative and Army engineer in the office last weekend from Chattahoochee, Fla., where a dam is being built across the Apalachicola River.”

If that was a bid for a silver dollar, Reader Ruder missed. TIME has exactly 40 subscribers in Chattahoochee, too.

Cordially yours,