John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview I
A Plowboy Interview with Shuttleworth who discusses his experiences living the self-reliant life that Mother Earth News is famous for, and how the idea for the magazine came about.
January/February 1975
By John Shuttleworth
 |
John and Jane Shuttleworth — both looking tired — sort through some of the thousands of letters that Mother Earth News recieves each week. Compare this photo to the one taken five years earlier.
MOTHER EARTH NEWS STAFF
|
Unlike the founding editor-publishers of many magazines, John Shuttleworth does not particularly care to fill the pages of his baby — Mother Earth News — with signed articles of opinion or pictures of himself. As a matter of fact, it's even difficult to tell by reading the masthead that Shuttleworth and his wife, Jane, founded the magazine in the first place.
RELATED CONTENT
We were saddened to learn today that John Shuttleworth — who co-founded Mother Earth News with his ...
Ever wanted Mother Earth News to come out more often? Or wanted more articles on your favorite topi...
AP News in Brief 11/6/2009 By The Associated Press Fort Hood, surrounding community mourn v...
The Editorial Advisory Group is the coolest thing to happen to Mother Earth News since recycled pap...
"Jane and I are both rather introverted farm people, "John says, "and we weren't looking for glamor when we started Mother Earth News. Besides, just the two of us did everything in the beginning and it would have been ridiculous to put our names on the masthead 10 or 15 times each back then. We just kind of got into the habit of listing ourselves once with no title and letting it go at that. "
And so it goes still. Little wonder that new subscribers to the magazine frequently wonder who is responsible for the periodical and how it came to be published.
In honor of the successful completion of the magazine's fifth year and in an effort to attract new people into the ecology and alternative lifestyle publishing field, Shuttleworth has finally — and somewhat reluctantly — agreed to answer those and other questions.
PLOWBOY: John, let's begin at the beginning. How did you come to found Mother Earth News?
SHUTTLEWORTH: You have to go back far more than five years to get the answer to that one. And don't be surprised to learn that the question might have been more apt if you had asked how Mother Earth News came to found me.
PLOWBOY: What do you mean?
SHUTTLEWORTH: I mean — given who and what I am — there was little chance that I wouldn't eventually wind up working with something like this magazine.
You have to consider first of all, I guess, the stock from which I come. I'm 100 percent Swiss-German on my mother's side and English — with rumors of Welsh, Irish, Scottish and French blood — on Dad's side of the family. I think that's important to know if you want to understand me. Because I'm always seeing in myself the very English tendency to impetuously set out on some grand voyage of discovery, balanced by the well-known Swiss propensity for paying meticulous attention to the details of whatever I do. This, of course, is an ideal heritage for the editor-publisher of a magazine to have.
Now it happened that both my maternal and paternal grandfathers were each in his own way gifted men. It also happened that both carried into the 20th century the dreams that had worked so well on this continent for the white man during the 18th and 19th centuries: Move on. There's always something better around the bend. Your fortune is waiting in the next territory, in the next state, in that big strike out west, in the new industry back east.
Unfortunately, the frontier for which that attitude was so well suited came to an end around 1890. And, unfortunately, my grandfathers — just like a great number of the more talented men of their generation — preferred to overlook the closing. While others with less imagination were content to hang on to the first piece of land they homesteaded or the first job they landed in a company town, my grandparents — and a lot of men like them — weren't. Instead, they were always ready — eager! — to pull stakes at the first rumor of better times in another state or another line of work.
Page: 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
Next >>
