UNITY – For nearly a quarter century of winter snowstorms, spring rains and summer heat, Jimmy Hubbard has hoofed it to and from his job as a custodian at a small college, rarely showing up late and never considering buying a car for his 5-mile daily round trip.
So far, his daily treks have power-walked the rail-thin 60-something the equivalent of more than the Earth’s equator, or nearly 14 transits of the Appalachian Trail. He has no intention of quitting his daily jaunts until his retirement in a couple of more years.
“I don’t mind,” Hubbard said on a recent morning after making his way to work through a late-winter rain that washed away part of the snow left by a blizzard a few days earlier. “It’s just the idea that I have to get where I’m going and just keep going till I get there.”
Hubbard pays little attention to the fact that he serves as a model of environmentalism at the ecology-minded Unity College in central Maine’s farming country where he works. He shows scant interest in the state’s media campaigns to get people to walk more and live healthier lives.
“I don’t do it to be a model,” Hubbard said with a wide, toothless grin. “I do it cause I have to get places.”
He had a car years ago – he doesn’t remember the year or model – but gave it to his brother. Besides, Hubbard never bothered to go for his driver’s license after getting his permit. “I’m just a person who doesn’t have to have a lot of fancy stuff,” he said.
Once in a while, he accepts a ride if someone offers it and conditions outside are especially bad.
Hubbard lives in a little yellow house in which he was born, which sits close to a road that winds through the woods at the edge of the town of about 1,800 people. On his 20 acres, he keeps a variety of pets, including three llamas, a bobcat, coyote, Canadian lynx and foxes, sheep, pheasants and peacocks.
Feeding and caring for his animals gets Hubbard up at 4 or 5 a.m., keeps him busy well into the evening after he returns from work, and costs $600 a month. “I’ve had animals ever since I was a kid,” said Hubbard, who is no longer married but lives with a son and teenage grandchildren. “It’s just a hobby.”
Most students on the campus of nearly 600 students have at least a passing familiarity with Hubbard, who carries home-baked cakes to his friends on the college staff on their birthdays, and gives them presents like ceramic statuettes. Female staff and some students get flowers on their birthdays.
“He’s a wicked sweet guy,” said Tyler Evan, a wildlife conservation major from Brattleboro, Vt. Some students say they knew Hubbard walks a lot, but didn’t know he walked so far.
“Basically, it’s a healthy campus, so he’s a role model,” said Kyle Koch of Madison, N.H., a junior ecology major.
The students think so highly of Hubbard that for the second year in a row this spring, he will hand out saplings to seniors as they march across the stage in a Unity graduation tradition. One of the professors took up a collection to buy Hubbard a bright yellow L.L. Bean jacket, which he wears on his daily jaunts.
A framed certificate on the wall of his closet-sized office, whose walls are crammed with photos and other mementoes and figurines he’s gathered, proclaims Hubbard the “King of Unity.”
Aimee Dorval, the college’s administrative assistant for facilities, appreciates Hubbard’s punctuality, noting that when other staffers were calling in to say they couldn’t make it after an early February snowstorm, “he wasn’t late or anything. He was on time.”
Hubbard’s daily routine also earns the admiration of state officials, who are trying to help Mainers avoid chronic diseases by getting people to exercise and live healthier lifestyles. State multimedia efforts focus on two leading causes of chronic disease: obesity and smoking.
More than 4,000 Mainers die every year and 29,000 are hospitalized from cardiovascular disease, according to the state Health Bureau. Much of the problem is due to lifestyles that have grown more unhealthy over the generations, as people eat fattier foods, ride more and sit for hours in front of their TVs and computers, said state Health Director Dora Anne Mills.
“Over the last 100 years, we’ve segregated daily exercise and good nutrition from our daily lives,” said Mills. The state is trying to reverse that trend, she said, and Hubbard is “a prime example of what people can do.”
Joining the Bureau of Health in the effort is Maine’s two-year-old Dirigo Health program, whose goal is to provide universal access to health care by 2009.
Health officials acknowledge that not everyone in a rural state like Maine can walk to work as Hubbard does. But state radio and television spots, which urge people to park their cars farther from work, walk while doing errands and use home chores as exercise routines, stress that any physical activity helps to improve health.
The state Transportation Department is studying how barriers to children walking to school can be removed, and a Healthy Maine Walks Web site helps to connect Mainers with trails and other safe walking routes within local communities.
The various state and local efforts are funded by a mix of government grants and donations from advocacy organizations.
Hubbard, who says he never smoked or drank, is rarely sick or misses a day of work. Besides his daily commutes, he keeps busy with physical tasks around his home, such as hauling fence posts for his animal enclosures when they need to be replaced.
He said he’s known nothing but work since he left school after eighth grade, when one of his first jobs was working on a poultry farm.
“When I started there, a bag of poultry feed weighed more than I did,” said Hubbard, who recalled weighing 98 pounds at the time. The seed bag weighed 100 pounds.
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On the Net:
Healthy Maine Walks: www.healthymainewalks.org
Unity College: http://www.unity.edu/
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