Mother advocated the renewed interest in the back-to-the-land movement at the beginning of the 1970s, combining this with an interest in the growing ecology movement and self-sufficiency. The focus of Mother was on do-it-yourself and how-to articles, aimed at the growing number of people moving to the country. There were articles on home building, farming, gardening, and entrepreneurism, all with a DIY approach. The subject matter of the articles ranged widely into such subjects as geodesic domes, hunting, food storage, and even a regular column on amateur radio. Alternative energy was a frequent topic covered in the magazine, with articles on how to switch to solar power and wind power, and how to make a still and run your car on ethanol. A series of “Plowboy Interviews” was also a regular feature, which included interviews of environmental leaders and others. Mother attracted a wide range of readers, not only of back to the landers but also others ranging from hippies, to survivalists, to suburban dwellers who dreamed of someday moving to the country, to long-time rural dwellers who found the DIY articles useful.

John Shuttleworth, born in 1937, was raised near Redkey Indiana on a 144 acre farm he described as a “wasteland” when his parents bought it. In a 1975 Mother “Plowboy” interview, John recalled that the local county Agricultural agent, along with a representative from the USDA, did a deep-dive analysis on the farmland. Both “experts”, as John referred to them, told the family the farm was beyond saving. In John’s words, “right about then was when we lost our respect for the USDA — because we all rolled up our sleeves and we did rebuild the farm. Dad rigged up a transit on the tractor, bought a roll-over scoop and a Graham plow, and made terraces around the hillsides that were washing the worst. He let the Canadian thistles grow and planted alfalfa and other deep-rooted crops that could reach down through and bust up the hardpan which was about all that was left in most of the fields. We became dairy farmers so we’d have a lot of manure to put back on the land every year. We paid to have humus in the form of corncobs that nobody else wanted hauled to our place from the grain elevators in neighboring towns. We even had cinders brought out from the factory where Dad worked to get the money we needed to revive that farm. Damn, it was hard work. And it paid off. My folks’ farm is one of the best in the area now.”

In 1958, after high school graduation and a couple of years at a local college, John hit the road. For ten years he travelled the United States, in his estimate having “30 or 40 address changes, and 80 or 100 jobs”. In early 1968, while working as a sales rep for a DIY Autogiro company, John found himself named Editor of a small, specialized aviation magazine in North Carolina. At the same time, he married Jane, a North Carolina farm girl. Later that year, John took a sales and promotion job with another manufacturer of build-it-yourself aircraft kits near Cleveland Ohio; and they moved to Chapman Avenue in Madison on the Lake.

By the summer of 1969, both Jane and John were ready to “drop out” – disenfranchised with the political and social unrest in the United States. They decided to return to a project John had considered 26 years before, of reviving the family farm concept, and living off the land. In John’s words, “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.” And that was how John and Jane came to found Mother Earth News, on their kitchen table, with a budget of $1,500, in Madison Ohio.

Mother began as a bimonthly publication. The first issues were priced at $1.00 or $1.35 if it was a ‘special’ issue. It quickly outgrew Shuttleworth’s kitchen table; and they moved their growing operations to a commercial building on Hubbard Rd. Soon, Mother moved into Madison Village, and was published from the second floor of 49 West Main. And Mother was a success! Its first year in 1970, Mother had an initial subscription list of 147 subscribers. According to John, “If you have no money to pay for help — as Jane and I had no money that first year — you’d better hope that you’re as lucky as we were. We offered room and board in exchange for teaching whoever responded what we knew about putting out a magazine. That brought in Kriss Kessler and Laurie Ezzell — two teenagers who worked shoulder to shoulder with Jane and me. I can remember Kriss and Laurie putting in one of those day-night-day-night-half-the-third-day work sessions with me to get an issue out. Fifty-plus straight hours on their feet and they never complained. And I couldn’t have done it without them. Then there were local high school and college aged people like Larry Holler, Cheryl Malec, Keith Shoemaker, and Phyllis MacGillivray. The first week of part-time work Cheryl put in, I remember, totaled 87 hours. You can imagine the time the rest of us were racking up. The point is that there was no way in hell for Jane and I to make MOTHER EARTH NEWS succeed the way we started the magazine. And even with the volunteer and incredibly underpaid help that folks like Kriss, Laurie, Larry, Cheryl, Keith, and Phyllis gave so willingly … there was still absolutely no chance that we’d ever make it. But we did. There’s a lot more people than John and Jane Shuttleworth who went above and beyond the call of duty that first year to make MOTHER EARTH NEWS a success.”

Joyce Pace, a former Madison resident, began work at Mother as general office help in mid-1971. Joyce recalled that “’You will work at the magazine’ was the all-encompassing way by which everyone was hired back when I went there. Later on, as the publication grew, they did hire general office for accounting but not when I was hired. I believe, once John had an opportunity to evaluate each person’s strengths and abilities, he would determine where their talents would be best used. Since I was an excellent typist (105 wpm) that was why I was later trained on the composer. Up until then I had to answer phones, answer multitudes of letters, research letter responses, do whatever was required at that time.” Joyce referred to John as a creative genius, and remarked how John and Jane were very devoted to the back-to-the-earth movement. She echoed John’s comments about working crazy long hours before deadline – Joyce would leave in the afternoon to make dinner for her family; then return to work, everyone staying long into the evening. “Everybody did everything – if someone needed help and if you didn’t know how to do (that) job, someone showed you. We would walk over to Dr. Faulkner’s Vet Clinic to fact-check an article or ask questions.” Mother received thousands of letters, and each one was hand answered; a task that everyone participated in.
Joyce recalled that the team at Mother was a diverse group made up of different ages, educational and cultural backgrounds, with a variety of talents, and, frequently changing. It was a high stress environment, and it wasn’t uncommon for an employee to quit on the spot. In trying to illustrate the experience, and the ‘feel’ of working at Mother, Joyce stated “It was a very empowering experience for me. I had worked in the corporate world prior… but by the time I went to Mother, my skills were somewhat rusty, my confidence level was low and my frame of mind lower. It did… revitalize me as a person and gave me the “confidence” to make some changes in my life and to tackle whatever obstacles came my way.” The most powerful remark from Joyce, regarding working at Mother, was that it was “one of the greatest experiences of my life.”

In mid-1973, Mother and the Shuttleworth’s left Madison to return to North Carolina. Mother had grown from a kitchen table enterprise to a magazine with a circulation of over 200,000; a mail-order general store, a syndicated newspaper column, and a syndicated radio program. According to John, in the 1975 Plowboy interview, “ We’ve made it partly because I didn’t know enough not to do things like work all day, all night, all day, all night and halfway through the third day to get an issue out.” John and Jane sold Mother to a group of the magazine’s employees in 1979. The magazine changed hands three more times; and in 2001, the current owners, Ogden Publications, purchased Mother. In 2020, the magazine celebrated its 50th Anniversary, and continues to be published bimonthly. As for John and Jane Shuttleworth, they divorced in the 1980’s, and went their separate ways. John died in Colorado in 2009, and Jane still resides in North Carolina.

Submitted by Jesse Devin, Social Media Assistant Madison Historical Society