We got a surprise visit the last day of the Energy Fair when Jd Belanger, the founder of Countryside magazine, drove up from Medford, Wisconsin, for a visit. I believe Jd founded present day Countryside in 1970, just before John Shuttleworth founded The Mother Earth News, but Jd incorporated Smallstock Journal, which had existed since 1917, into the magazine, making the magazine title Countryside and Small Stock Journal. I could be off a bit on my dates.

Whatever, Jd is the granddaddy of homesteading magazines, and he managed to keep Countryside in the family (his children, Dave and Anne-marie now run it) so it never went through the many changes that Mother Earth News did.

I hadn’t seen Jd for about five years, as he’s a bit older than me and retired earlier, so I hardly recognized him when he walked up to the booth.

“Is that you, Jd?” I asked when he kind of just stood there in front of the BHM booth. The tip-off was that he was a big man wearing a Countryside T-shirt.

He answered: “I wasn’t sure that was you either, Dave.”

When you get to be our age, I guess you start changing rapidly in a matter of only a few years. It must be all the benefits of getting to relax and having the younger generation do all the work. Jd says he spends a lot of his time now writing books, but he did just manage to get in his garden. His next book, he says, will be some sort of Encyclopedia of self-reliance, which one of the big-time book publishers asked him to write.

I’ve always thought Jd’s original formula for a magazine was a terrific idea — having readers write in their personal experiences about their homestead and its various projects, then printing the letters, topped with a headline, relatively untouched. The magazine’s pages are interspersed with regular articles like BHM has, but Countryside is essentially a reader-written magazine.

Jd’s son, Dave, now runs the magazine, and where Jd was essentially a writer like Shuttleworth, Dave is an astute businessman who has taken Countryside’s circulation from about 30,000 to over 100,000. Jd’s daughter, Anne-marie, runs the editorial side of Countryside, and his daughter-in-law, Elaine, runs circulation. He even has his granddaughter, Kate, who is 21, working at the magazine. Now that’s how you keep a magazine true to its roots. I’m doing something similar with Backwoods Home, having my children take over the business.

I bought Jd a beer and we had a great visit.

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