Since my parents were in the habit of watching television news every night, I would have heard the report on November 26, 1967, about McLuhan undergoing what was at the time the longest continuous brain surgery ever attempted, which successfully removed a large, benign brain tumor. It is most likely that I first heard the name on television or maybe even saw McLuhan in one of his many talk show appearances (in those days authors were featured routinely on such programs). Admittedly, it was most likely to have been a collection of Peanuts cartoons or Mad magazine material that caught my attention, but there were many intellectual, indeed scholarly, books included in the mix, and I did have a wandering eye when it came to reading material. Unlike today, when larger, trade paperbacks are the norm, at that time smaller and relatively inexpensive books in the format pioneered by Pocket Books were plentiful, sold in many different types of retail outlets, stationary stores, five-and-dimes, drug stores, supermarkets, newspaper stands, and the many small, independent bookstores that once were commonplace. Maybe I first saw the name on the pocket-sized paperback edition of that book that was published the following year. I may have first seen the name when I was seven years old on a magazine cover or in a newspaper article, following the explosion of publicity that surrounded the publication of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). Growing up in the sixties, there were some names that were simply environmental, part of the cultural (and countercultural) backdrop-names like Timothy Leary, Bob Dylan, Jane Fonda, Ken Kesey, Jerry Garcia, Twiggy, Tom Wolfe, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono. I can’t say when I first heard the name Marshall McLuhan.

Hobbs (Ed.) Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy through Personal Narrative (pp.

Mcluhan 1964