Old men like me have favorite stories we like to tell, retell, and then tell again. That often drives people crazy, especially those who are nearest and dearest to us and can’t escape.

You, on the other hand, don’t know me from a stone. You might have read one of my books (the most likely being Storey’s Guide to Raising Dairy Goats or Homesteader’s Handbook to Raising Small Livestock), but those were written many years ago. And it’s been 10 years since I, and my Beyond the Sidewalks column, dropped out of the pages of Countryside magazine, so either you’ve never heard of me or you’ve forgotten all my favorite stories. Which means I get to start over again!

One of my all-time faves is how Countryside magazine began.

I had dreamed of homesteading all my life, although we didn’t call it that back then. In the 1940s it was simply “farming.”  My uncle’s farm was typical. He milked about a dozen cows, by hand and lantern light. The milk was cooled in cans in the springhouse, which was “refrigerated” by cold water, and hauled to town by the horses, which also provided power for the field work.

There were chickens, producing eggs to eat or sell and an occasional chicken dinner. One sow furnished piglets, enough to keep the family of 12 in pork, with some left over to sell.

There was a huge garden, of course, and an orchard and berry patch. We slept on crinkly corn-husk mattresses, pumped water by hand, and hauled in wood for the kitchen range. An older cousin recently reminded me of how I hated to pick beans, but I don’t remember that: To me, everything on our summer visits was just wonderful. I wanted to be a farmer. (When I hated to pick beans was as a migrant laborer in California; but that’s another story.)

World War II changed everything. Some genius decided that all those factories making bombs and gunpowder from ammonia could just as easily make fertilizer. Many factors contributed to replacing the horses with trucks and tractors. Electricity came to the farm, chickens and pigs became specialties not to be bothered with on a dairy farm, and dairy farmers needed fancy equipment and larger herds in order to stay in business. By the mid-fifties, when I graduated from high school, the farms of my youth were nearly extinct, it took a small fortune to even get started, and it wasn’t the kind of farming I was interested in anyway. I obviously had to find some other way to make a living, and hopefully, one day I could “farm” the way I wanted to, probably as a hobby, or a sideline.

So I became a journalist, flying around the country until all airports and hotel rooms looked the same, and I decided it was time to take action.

Diane, who had been a stay-at-home mom, made use of her RN degree by getting a job in a hospital, while I quit my magazine job and became a Mr. Mom. With a home-based business, the Countryside Print Shop. And a garden, and then rabbits, and chickens, geese, goats, sheep, a pig, and a hive of bees, all on one acre, on the edge of a small town — just beyond the sidewalks.

Everything went swimmingly, and we had all of the usual first-homestead adventures: the call from the post office that the chicks had arrived, and later, a more urgent call about the bees, several of which had escaped; the thrill of the first pullet egg; the first rabbit butchering experience; the goat milk, the cheese, and all of the other pleasures and delightful experiences that come with what we began to call “homesteading.”

Then came time to butcher the pig. I had a general idea of how to do it, but couldn’t find any information on such topics as curing and smoking bacon and ham. Using my journalism experience, I did a little research and decided to call the Meat Science Department at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin.

I explained what I was looking for, and there was a long silent pause. Then the guy laughed. “People don’t make bacon,” he chuckled. “Oscar Mayer makes bacon!” (I later encountered the same attitude with organic gardening, goats, and other topics, which to this day colors my attitude toward county agents, even though now some of them act like they invented all this stuff.)

When I mentioned this experience to an 85-year-old neighbor who lived just across the road, he offered to help, or at least show me what to do. And then he went into his attic and brought down his hog scraper and lard press for me to use!

The hog butchering was a success, but the wheels had started turning. Certainly there were other people who wanted to know and do the same kinds of things I wanted to know and do. There obviously were other elderly people who had the knowledge we were looking for, and who wouldn’t be around much longer to share their experience. I was a professional writer, I owned a printing press…

In the summer of 1969 I placed a $25 classified ad in Organic Farming & Gardening, a magazine I had been avidly reading for several years, and one I had written “homesteading” articles for. I offered a one-page (12” x 18”, the biggest sheet my press could handle) newsletter on “homesteading.” It was only one sheet, folded to 6” x 9”, because I had little idea of what would be in it, but also because I had been involved in magazines, and didn’t want the production hassles of anything bigger. This was going to be for my own education, not a business enterprise. Therefore the subscription price was $1 a year — plus a letter with a question, or an answer to a previous question, about self-sufficient living.

The first ad brought a few replies, the second a few more, enough to pay the postage. The only thing that kept it going was the fact that I was willing to do the editing, printing, addressing, mailing etc. for free. However, the response, even from those few readers, was so great that I soon had to add another sheet, and then so many more it became necessary to staple them into a 6” x 9” booklet, and when that got too fat for our hand stapler, we had to increase the page size to 8-1/2” x 11”.  The rest, as they say, is history.

There’s more to this, which I’ll share next time. And of course, I’ll be delighted to tell you many other stories from beyond the sidewalks.