John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part I
(Page 2 of 17)
January/February 1975
By John Shuttleworth
As a result, my mother grew up in the Swiss settlements near Indiana's Limberlost Swamps, in Oklahoma and Texas oil boom towns, and in various and sundry locations in and around Muncie, Ind. Her father made a living, such as it was, mainly as a trader. He bought and sold horses, cars, livestock, land, houses, machinery — whatever there was a deal to be made on. When all was said and done, however, Johnny Kuntz was too gentle a man for that way of life. He was the kind of guy who'd give you the shirt off his back, and other people generally took it. My mother grew up poor.
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Dad didn't fare any better. He was one of 10 children, and Grandpa Shuttleworth dragged his family from Indiana to a homestead in South Dakota to Virginia to Ohio and back to Indiana. I don't know how many moves they did make, but I think Dad went to five different schools for the first grade alone. All that traveling around, of course, was largely unnecessary. My grandfather could pick and choose his work. He was a damn good blacksmith and mechanic. For his day, he was a passable farmer and I understand that he had rather uncanny abilities when it came to training horses and dogs. He also originated a lot of laborsaving devices, and family legend has it that he invented the roller bearing, installed one on an old worn-out water-pumping windmill, and then had the idea stolen by the man who later founded the Timken Roller Bearing Company. That may be true and it may not. What matters, as far as my father was concerned, is that my grandfather had trouble settling down. He was a drifter and a tinkerer and dad grew up as poor as Job's turkey.
As so often happens, however, my parents' uncertain childhoods guaranteed a very secure upbringing for my sister and
me. Mom and Dad were married in 1928 and started their life together with hardly a nickel to their name. Due to the way they were raised, though, they were both coming — as the song from The Unsinkable Molly Brown says — "from nowhere on their way to somewhere." They were not afraid to work night and day — in other words, to build some security for themselves — and they did.
Just about the time they were getting on their feet, of course, the Depression knocked my folks flat again. But that only made them work harder. And little by little they scrimped and saved until they could make the down payment on 40 acres between Eaton and Wheeling, Ind. Now 40 acres isn't much, and the land through that area certainly isn't the richest in the world — but that's where I spent the first seven years of my life and that little farm was like a kingdom to me. Times were tough for a lot of people back then in the late 30s and very early 40s, but we had a big garden and cows and pigs and chickens, and we always ate well.
A great number of friends and relatives also ate well at our place, had their hair cut free by my parents, their cars and broken appliances repaired at no cost by my father, and went away laden with gifts of food canned by my mother, and otherwise weathered the depression more or less at the expense of Dick and Esther Shuttleworth.
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