Speaker
Bob Sheasley
Position
Author
Biographical Sketch
Bob Sheasley and his wife, Suzanne, operate Lilyfield Farm in Worcester Township, Montgomery County, where they rent horse stables, grow daylilies, and raise chickens. An editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer for 15 years, he and his wife live on an 18th century farmstead. He is also the author of “Home to Roost: A backyard farmer chases chickens through the ages,” published in 2008 and 2009 by St. Martin’s Press.
Visiting with his wife, he read selections from the book and a recent essay, “Newspapers at Season’s End: Journalism, Farming, and Other Lives,” that he wrote in summer 2009 for “Lost,” an online magazine that deals with things that are passing from our culture – and, sadly, that seems to include newspaper journalism, to which he has devoted his career. He contrasted his experiences with fading worlds he knew so well: He grew up on a Western Pennsylvania dairy farm, in Amish country near New Wilmington, and in his youth he saw the struggles of small family farming; as a young man, he was a newspaper reporter covering the dying steel industry, and now, at 52, he faces the sea change in journalism as the Internet forever changes the course of newspapers.
Presentation Summary
Visiting with his wife, Bob Sheasley read selections from the book and a recent essay, “Newspapers at Season’s End: Journalism, Farming, and Other Lives,” that he wrote in summer 2009 for “Lost,” an online magazine that deals with things that are passing from our culture – and, sadly, that seems to include newspaper journalism, to which he has devoted his career. He contrasted his experiences with fading worlds he knew so well: He grew up on a Western Pennsylvania dairy farm, in Amish country near New Wilmington, and in his youth he saw the struggles of small family farming; as a young man, he was a newspaper reporter covering the dying steel industry, and now, at 52, he faces the sea change in journalism as the Internet forever changes the course of newspapers:
“It’s not journalism we’re losing, any more than it was agriculture or steel. What I saw dying when I left the farm was a way of life. What I saw dying in those steel towns was a way of life. When my mother’s parents left Ireland, the Pittsburgh steel mills sustained the family. When my father’s parents fled Brooklyn during the Depression, it was a farm that sustained them. I grew up on that farm, and when it was my time to go, I turned to another venerable institution to earn my way.
“Small farms, factories, newspapers – these are part of what defined me, once, and the generations before me. They were facts of life for so many people. As new generations sweep in, the Internet is distorting the facts radically. Go online, young man: That’s the mantra I hear now from well-meaning career advisers. I’m young enough to adjust, indeed, and by working online, I can work from home, alone. No more newsroom bustle, no more sweating together as stories break on deadline. Goodbye to that.
“And maybe that will be all right. I’ll stay on this little farm that reminds me of my other bygones. I’ve learned that you can’t go home again – nothing is quite the same. But I can say with pride that once I made a good living at one of the great dailies, and didn’t we have us a time?”
Each day, Sheasley leaves Lilyfield Farm and heads into the city. And each day, he brings along a basket of eggs for his coworkers at The Inquirer. Depending on the breed of hen, these eggs may be white, green, rose, blue, or as brown as chocolate. And they are all deliciously fresh, a taste of the rural way of life that people have enjoyed for millennia, one in which chickens have played a supporting role for nearly as long.
In his book, “Home to Roost,” he tells of the intertwined relationship between humans and chickens. He delves into where chickens came from, what their DNA tells us about our kinship, how we’ve treated our feathered fellow travelers, and the roads we’re crossing together. This is a story of agriculture and human migration, of folk medicine and technology, of how we dreamed of the good life, threw it away, and want it back.
Modern farming has changed the lives of both bird and man over the past century. But backyard farmers offer hope for a return to the pleasures of locally grown food, as diverse as the chickens on Lilyfield Farm.
“Reading this book,” says Julie Zickefoose, author of “Letters from Eden” and a regular commentator on “Prairie Home Companion,” “is like walking down a quiet corridor of a museum, peeping into this room and that. All manner of curiosities await discovery. Home to Roost is a compulsively readable history of man’s relationship with Gallus domesticus, rich with anecdote, fable, and fact. Sheasley can write, and his lyrical, often droll prose winds around and through the happy maze of fact and fiction he’s constructed. Even as he tackles sobering topics like avian flu and the pathetic physical and behavioral wreck we’ve made of the factory-farmed hen, his affection for chickens, and the people who exploit them, shines through. There’s hope in the gleaming basket of pastel eggs he totes to work, and Sheasley shows by his own example the world he believes hens—and humans—richly deserve to inhabit.”
In an effort to provide wide-ranging views and perspectives regarding the practice of and issues surrounding agriculture, the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture (PSPA) seeks speakers representing a variety of perspectives. The statements and opinions they present are strictly their own and do not necessarily represent the views of PSPA.