John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part I
(Page 11 of 17)
January/February 1975
By John Shuttleworth
PLOWBOY: By the time you were in your late teens, then, the course of your life was set.
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SHUTTLEWORTH: Exactly. I knew who I was. I knew where my allegiance lay. I knew who and what I considered to be the enemy. And I had already begun sharpening my skills as a communicator so that I could work effectively for what I thought was good and against what I felt to be bad.
PLOWBOY: Then why didn't you start something like Mother Earth News in the late 50s? Why did you wait until 1970 to publish the first issue of the magazine?
SHUTTLEWORTH: Well, it's one thing to have good intentions and to feel strongly about certain matters and to thrash around more or less in a particular direction. It's quite another to focus in on the one most effective action you can take to further your ideals, call your shot for all to see, and then do exactly what you said you'd do.
The difference between the low road and the high road — once your course is set — is seasoning and experience. I knew what I had to do 15 years before I knew how to begin doing it.
PLOWBOY: So you left home looking for experience.
SHUTTLEWORTH: Right. I muddled around on my parents' farm for a few more years and haunted the largest nearby libraries and wasted a couple of years in college and experimented with flying machines — which, even then, made more sense, ecologically, than automobiles — and worked at a local airport and did some aerial photography and freelanced and carried on a large correspondence with a wide variety of people and added a great deal of material to my files.
By 1958, however, the home pasture was no longer big enough to hold me. So I jumped the fence and headed out for parts unknown.
PLOWBOY: And you say that during roughly a ten-year period you had 30 or 40 changes of address and worked at 80 to 100 jobs.
SHUTTLEWORTH: Yes, that's right. I was actively trying to compress as many varied experiences — work experiences — as I could into a minimum amount of time. I'd frequently hold down three jobs at once, and still have enough energy and spare minutes leftover to squeeze in experiments with an exotic airfoil or to play with one of Fuller's dome ideas or to do some freelance writing and cartooning on the side.
PLOWBOY: What did you do for fun?
SHUTTLEWORTH: My father had taught me a long time before that there was just as much fun in shifting from one kind of work to another as there was in going out and running around and spending money. I had a hell of a lot of fun during that ten years. Man, I was operating full blast! I had all the stops pulled out and I was gaining strength, depth and breadth daily.
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