TIME is 21 years old this month--for it was in March 1923 that our first issue was delivered to some 12,000 hopeful subscribers. And one of the things we are proudest of today is how many of that original 12,000 are TIME subscribers still, and can remember back with us--as perhaps you can yourself--to the news in that very first issue.

(1923 was the year of Teapot Dome and Mah Jong and Emile Coue and the dance marathons-- of the play Rain and the book Black Oxen--of the new airline to Chicago and the year-old dictator named Mussolini in Italy.)

Naturally enough, some of our first readers did not like TIME. It annoyed Emily Post "to the point of threatening my sanity." And Alice Foote MacDougall wrote: "I don't know what your policy is, but it seems to me a most irritating one."

But from the very beginning, those who did like TIME were apt to like it very much. One of these was the discerning President of Cornell, Dr. Livingston Farrand, who spent each Friday evening with TIME and "was never disappointed." Colonel E. M. House found that TIME "filled a long-felt need." Newton D. Baker "read every issue." Senator Borah found it "excellent--brief, brilliant, up-to-the-hour."

The job TIME did for those busy people in 1923 was, quite simply, to read the newspapers and magazines for them (including the Tokyo Asahi, The Violin World, Punch, The Garden Magazine, and Yachting), and then tell them quickly, clearly, vividly, understandingly all the news they would want to know and remember.

That is still TIME'S basic job. But year by year, as more and more of you have signed up to share the expense, we have expanded our services again and again: adding the full wire service of the Associated Press -- posting more than 200 of our own correspondents all over the world --opening our own editorial offices in London, Moscow, Cairo, Algiers, Stockholm, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Honolulu, New Delhi, Chungking, and nine U.S. cities.

And today, when it is so much harder to gather the news and make sure it all adds up to a true picture of world affairs, we spend twice as much each week for editing, writing and research as we could afford to spend in a whole year at the start.

Twenty-one years is a long time as magazines go. Most of the famous magazines of 1923 are gone now--Scribner's, Century, World's Work, Outlook, McClure's, Everybody's, Review of Reviews, Vanity Fair, Forum, Metropolitan, The Literary Digest. Of the ten leading advertising media today only three were in business when TIME began. And of the 13 other magazines which started publication the same year only two remain. So I think every one of us at TIME is deeply conscious on this 21st birthday that any magazine must change and grow with its times to survive.

TIME has many plans for the postwar years. Some of them are for making a better magazine; others are for delivering TIME the same Thursday or Friday all over the world--to help Americans abroad and English-reading people everywhere get the same straight, clear, true kind of news that Americans get right here at home.

But not one of these plans could have reached even the blue-print stage without the subscribers whose persistent (though often critical) loyalty has brought us through to this milestone in our publishing life.

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