John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part I
(Page 8 of 17)
January/February 1975
By John Shuttleworth
PLOWBOY: And you, of course, wanted to preserve the family farm even at that time. Where did you start?
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SHUTTLEWORTH: From the very beginning I realized that people were losing their land because they couldn't pay their taxes or they couldn't scrape up the money due on a mortgage.
Now these were good and decent people. People with simple tastes. They didn't need or want a lot of money, but it was evident that they did need some. And that set me off on a lifelong search for self-employment and home business ideas. By the time I was 10 or 11 I already had a pretty good file of clipped articles on the subject, and I had already answered half the "make money at home" ads in the classified sections of the mechanics magazines.
Most of the "plans" offered for sale, of course, were utter trash. Pipe dreams that made a lot more money for the guy selling them than they'd ever make for the people doing the buying. Once in a while, though, I'd turn up a real gem.
One of the best of those early plans, as I recall, was a $3 mimeographed set of instructions I bought from the "3M Company" in Argyle, Wis. The three Ms stood for something like "Merchants' Mimeographing and Mailing" service, and the folio I got for my money told me how to get paid for organizing and distributing a little "booster" newspaper for the stores in a small country town. It was a good idea for the time; although, like so many other businesses with genuine merit, it was eventually taken over — and is now dominated — by real moneygrubbers.
PLOWBOY: Did you turn up anything else that you considered particularly good at that time?
SHUTTLEWORTH: Yes, when I was only seven or eight I began seeing those fantastic ads for Ed and Carolyn Robinson's Have More plan.
PLOWBOY: The ones that said, "A Little Land . . . A Lot of Living"?
SHUTTLEWORTH: Yep! "How to Do Wonders With a Little Land!", "The New Science of Miniature Farming," "How to Make a Small Cash Income Into the Best and Happiest Living Any Family Could Want."
Those headlines just knocked me out. For some reason I never seemed to have the money to send off for the actual Have More plan at the time, but I used to read those ads over and over and over again. That's what I was talking about! I finally filed one of the Robinson advertisements away when I was about 10, absolutely determined that I'd own a copy of Ed and Carolyn's plan one day.
PLOWBOY: And did you?
SHUTTLEWORTH: Yeah, but a few things happened in between. My sister and I both had polio, for instance, in the fall of 1948.
PLOWBOY: You both had polio?
SHUTTLEWORTH: Yes, that was unusual — and I still have my own theory about the "coincidence."
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