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Life Trekking Coach
9/8/2009 2:35 AM UTC
Nice show!
The Man In Black
5/23/2009 2:20 PM UTC
Like the show. I'll be listening.
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Family Preparedness Guide
I grew up in the post-WWII ex-urban lifestyle that included living by self-reliance principles––grow what you eat, eat what you grow––there were five hungry siblings at the table, so nothing was ever left over! Our family lived the preparedness lifestyle long before it was considered a positive attribute! On the farm of my maternal grandfather, we lived pretty much off the land. We raised chickens, pigs, cows, horses, and lived off the land. We played on haystacks and inside the barns. We also raised annual crops of corn, sugar cane, peas, beans, carrots, squash, onions, cucumbers, and hot peppers––don’t forget the okra and eggplant! Everything went into a bottle––I actually thought food grew in bottles in the dark of the basement! It was in the late summer after my 8th birthday that I found out how all those fruits and veggies got into those bottles in the basement storeroom. That summer, my parents determined I was old enough to learn how to tend the garden, pick the vegetables, and participate in the canning and bottling––and hauling them to the basement! After several years, our family moved to a larger house on less land farther out of the city. A yard garden, in-home food production, and food preservation were continued to be part of life until college days. Birth of Basics… In January 1974, I developed Making the Best of Basics—Family Preparedness Handbook. The 1st edition of Making the Best of Basics was a self-published family enterprise, approximately 150 pages, hand-typed on a portable typewriter, printed on one side from paper masters, hand-collated, and assembled around an eight-sided table in our dining room. The pages were held together by a brass pin in one corner! The first 1,100 printed copies of Basics sold for $2, and entirely sold out in just a few hours on a Saturday afternoon! With such early success and additional requests for copies, we boldly decided to print more! The 2nd printing of 5,000 copies––printed on both sides of the paper and glued––sold out in 8 days! For the next few months, several printings and revisions magically sold and the printer was kept working overtime. After graduate school, I turned corporate, gaining ground on being an 8-5 executive, and tired of publishing the book, so I turned it over to my business partner to develop. It wasn’t too long before he lost interest, the demand lessened, and I got out of the book business. We moved around the country with our 6 children, eventually living in San Antonio TX. In 1994, some people contacted me to acquire the rights to the book, and having recently had some marital, job-related, and financial difficulties all at once, decided to check out the book’s potential to determine its market value before committing to a selling price. It was the beginning of the Y2K problem, and after a few trips to survivalist and gun shows in the Texas area, I printed some of the chapters and began selling them for $2-$3 each. Then, I began collecting vendor data at the shows, compiled it into a small booklet, and the rest is the return of Basics!