John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part I
(Page 14 of 17)
January/February 1975
By John Shuttleworth
As a matter of fact, I didn't know how myself, at first. And, as a result, I almost blew the whole game back in the mid-60s when I wrote — and then destroyed — half of a 200,000-word manual called The Beachcomber, Rambler and Wayfarer's Handbook. That guide was actually about low-energy living systems and I didn't even realize it at the time because I was trying too hard to sugarcoat the basic message.
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PLOWBOY: You've lost me.
SHUTTLEWORTH: I'll bet I've lost everyone at the moment. But you'll all get found again in a few minutes when I explain just how I — as they say in the advertising biz — "positioned" Mother Earth News . First, however, let me give you the last little bit of history that led up to the magazine's founding.
In early 1968, while working in the sales department of a small North Carolina manufacturer of build-it-yourself autogiro kits, I suddenly found myself — through an involved series of circumstances — named editor of a little, highly specialized aviation magazine. I didn't want the job. I had no desire to go as whacky as most editors seemed to be trying to fit copy around illustrations and advertisements. I took the position with extreme reluctance.
However, once I had thrown out the "right" way to put a publication together and started doing it my way — all articles run straight on instead of carried over into the back, all editing done to make reading easier for the reader instead of to impress other editors, etc. — I found that the periodical's audience responded with overwhelming warmth and that I rather enjoyed the job.
Along about then, at the age of 31 I married Jane, a North Carolina farm girl who had been thrashing about from one city job to another much as I had done, and we soon moved close to Cleveland, Ohio, where I had taken a sales and promotion job with another manufacturer of build-it-yourself aircraft kits.
By the summer of 1969 — and think back to what 1969 and 1970 were like in this country — the nation had become so polarized that Jane and I were both ready to "drop out,"the In Term back in those days, of the whole corporate-oriented system and go back to North Carolina, find a little farm up in the mountains, and live happily ever after.
Except that we realized we could not live alone as free individuals in an increasingly closed society. So we decided we'd reach back to the project I had undertaken 26 years before, reviving the family farm, and we'd "take some folks out to the land with us." That is, we'd help others realize the dream of going "back to the land" and, thereby, make it increasingly possible for us to get back to the land ourselves.
We would do this, we thought, by publishing a little newsletter that I could put together in my spare time between the woodchoppin' and the plowin'.
Of course, it didn't work out that way. As soon as I started roughing out the first issue of the newsletter, it was apparent we'd have to publish a magazine if we expected to do the job that needed to be done. It was also apparent that the small family farm was never going to be revived in our increasingly centralized and corporate society, until that society was decentralized and humanized, as the Vocations for Social Change people used to say, "All we have to do is change the world completely."
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