Rodale, Inc.

Transcription

MS. MacLEAN: Mr. Robert Rodale is a publisher whose interest in developing environmentally sound farming and gardening systems has influenced American agriculture. Jane Gates, of the National Agricultural Library's Alternative Farming Systems Information Center, will talk with Mr. Rodale today, and the taped interview will be added to the National Agricultural Library's Oral History Collection. Today is Tuesday, November 21, 1989. My name is Jayne MacLean, coordinator of the Alternative Farming System's Information Center. MS. GATES: Good morning. It really is a pleasure to be here and to have a chance to ask you some questions and listen to you talk and put it on record. I was reading about you before I came, and I read where one of your earliest instructors had met Abraham Lincoln. MR. RODALE: Right. MS. GATES: That's quite a connection. MR. RODALE: Yeah. MS. GATES: Do you remember him? The instructor, not Abraham Lincoln. MR. RODALE: Oh, yeah. Sure. I don't remember his first name. His last name was Donecker [ph], but he was a combination carpenter and farm person that my father hired. It was 1942. The war was on, and my father could only hire very old men because the other men were all working, and me, I was 12 years old, so this fellow was teaching me farming and other things, and I think he was about in his late 80s or very late 80s at the time. MS. GATES: He would have to be. MR. RODALE: Yeah. But he said that when he was six years old, Abraham Lincoln came through this area on a campaign swing, and his mother held him up and he shook hands with Abraham Lincoln. MS. GATES: Now, when you say "this area," you mean right here in Pennsylvania? MR. RODALE: Yeah, in Southeastern Pennsylvania, near Allentown. Emmaus is a suburb of Allentown. MS. GATES: And you have been here all your life? MR. RODALE: Well, I was actually born in New York City. I was born in 1930, but my parents moved here in 1930, about five months after I was born, and I have lived here ever since. Not only that, but I went to school here, to college at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, so the longest I have ever been away from this area has been, I think, six weeks in 59 years. MS. GATES: That's impressive. Before we leave that period of time in your life, though, I wanted to ask you about the depression years. Was your father's income from the farm? MR. RODALE: No. He and his brother had started a small electrical equipment manufacturing company making switches and extension cords, connectors, different parts, in New York, and they moved that to Emmaus because there had been a silk industry here which went bad and there were a lot of empty silk mill buildings. And the town offered him one of these buildings free if they would move here, which was the inducement that got him here. MS. GATES: That was fairly progressive back then. MR. RODALE: Yes. So, during the depression, I am sure we didn't suffer nearly as much as a lot of other people, but the business, of course, was terrible, and I know there were times when my father couldn't pay the rent. We moved four or five times during the depression. At the very bottom, we lived up on the mountain nearby in a summer cabin that had a fireplace in it for one winter, but then when it was all over, my father paid back all the rent that he hadn't paid during the depression. MS. GATES: Did you always have a garden? MR. RODALE: Well, we really didn't do much gardening. My father actually was born in the lower East Side of New York, and he was brought up in an area which I understand is the most densely populated area ever in the history of the world, the lower East Side. The tenement houses, people were just sleeping in rows, and they were a number of stories high, so it was very compact humanity, but he was interested in plants, and he would go up on the roof and grow plants in pots, and he loved plants in that environment. He actually had bought a farm in Connecticut in the '20s for $10. He paid $10. MS. GATES: For the farm? MR. RODALE: In Richfield, Connecticut, which is now like "the" most expensive place, and they, of course, paid it off. They only had it a few years, but they did it I don't know if they did gardening there, but they really liked rural life, my father and his brother, my mother and so forth. During the depression, I don't really recall him gardening, but he wanted a farm, and he bought what is now the original we call it the "Old Farm," the Organic Garden Experimental Farm, in 1941, and he immediately went into gardening, but what really drove him, his interest, first of all, was health. He came from a large family, and he considered himself sort of the weak person in the family. MS. GATES: He didn't have good health? MR. RODALE: He did not have it's hard to say, you know, what is good health, I don't really know, but he was rejected for the Army in World War I for some I think poor eyesight, he had problems with his vision. Doctor said he had a heart murmur, which today they would I am sure say forget it, you know, it's a temporary thing, but he felt in those days, they said, oh, your heart doesn't sound right. They didn't know much. It really was traumatic to him. So he spent his early life experimenting with different health routines, vegetarianism. He read all like Bernarr Macfadden material of the early '20s and '30s, and he was always trying different diets. And he also was publishing magazines. Rodale Press was founded in 1930, the year they moved to Emmaus, but they published other things, humor magazines, and then he had a series of digests. Reader's Digest was real big in those days, so there were a lot of imitators, and he had four or five of the imitators of Reader's Digest, one of which was called Fact Digest, which was very successful, but he had a health magazine then called Health Guide, a little digest, but his interest in organic farming came he was like primed for health. He said that somehow the American way of eating, growing food, is not healthy. MS. GATES: Was he encouraged in this by his parents, or was this something that he truly pioneered on this own? MR. RODALE: Well, he was kind of a loner. His father died early. He never got along with his father anyway. His mother was alive. She didn't I don't think she played a part in this. It is hard to say. I am sure he had people who influenced him, but it was mostly through his reading and through attending lectures and whatever, but he read Sir Albert Howard's book MS. GATES: Yes. MR. RODALE: and he made the statement which I will never forget. He said, "It hit me like a ton of bricks, like everything came together." Here was a man who said farming needs to be done in a natural way because it's healthier for the environment, for the land, for the crops, the crops are better, the food is better. MS. GATES: That must have been exciting for him. MR. RODALE: Well, I am sure it was a very exciting period, and he wrote I went back not long ago. We are getting now to the point of like 50 years of the organic movement in the United States, so if organic gardening and farming started in 1942, by now 1992 it will be 50 years. So I went back and I knew he had written about organic farming in Fact Digest before organic gardening. MS. GATES: Oh, really? MR. RODALE: And I found I thought it was several years before, but actually, it was only several months. It was a two part article in January, February, and the February issue, 1942, he introduced to Americans the idea of organic farming. MS. GATES: In Fact Digest. MR. RODALE: In a magazine called "Fact Digest." MS. GATES: Okay. MR. RODALE: That was like his pure thinking there, and it was from a health perspective. He said the American food system is pesticide residues, too much artificial fertilizer, too much soil erosion, and too much processing, and he said if we are going to be healthy, we are going to have to invent a different way to grow and produce and process our food. I don't know what the reaction to those articles was. I still think there may have been an earlier one somewhere. I haven't given up. [Laughter.] MS. GATES: Earlier than '42? MR. RODALE: Earlier than '42. MS. GATES: I wonder if we have that at the NAL. I will have to check. MR. RODALE: Well, I doubt if you have it. These are magazines that were printed on newsprint kind of stuff, but I know he read Sir Albert Howard's books sometime in the '30s, the late '30s, so he might have reviewed it.