By the time Mars reaches the garage, he’s already feeling a little better. A lark perches on the roof, laughingly hopping from foot to foot, happily mocking the long-faced kid. Mars examines the tiny bird closely, thinking it’s not a big fancy thing but – its up there on the roof of the Levins’ garage strutting and mimicking Mars to beat the band. Sassy little devil. Sort of like the boat he’s building with Red. It’ll float, thinks Mars, squaring his lantern jaw. It’ll float. He’ll make it float. All the doubters will eat their words. If he has to bail water till the cows keel over, that boat will float.
The lark on the Levins’ roof, perfectly on cue, whistles in affirmation. Mars swears it. And, that’s what he’ll call the boat, too. The Lark. For a lark on the river with Red in the boat that will most definitely float.
Count on it.
Almost a decade into the twentieth century, highly intelligent and ambitious nineteen-year-old Elsie Naomi Hall, in possession of a freshly minted teacher’s certificate from Acadia, Nova Scotia’s then-Baptist university, joins her family in Mannville, Alberta; within weeks, she’s handily secured a position in one of the area’s better schools. It is there, at a Sunday picnic, the delicate and doe-eyed beauty proudly announces she’s met and plans to marry the tall, handsome, and charming Herbert McLuhan on 31 December 1909.
A year later, the adventurous newlyweds relocate a hundred miles due west to Edmonton to begin their life together. While the amiable Herb forms a promising real-estate company – McLuhan, Sullivan & McDonald – with his trio of partners, Elsie prepares for the 21 July 1911 arrival of the first of their two sons, Herbert Marshall, just before the couple takes up permanent residence in their spacious two-storey custom-built home in Edmonton’s well-to-do Highlands district. Then, following the birth of Marshall’s younger brother, Maurice Raymond, on 9 August 1913 (and the addition of Rags, the family’s beloved Airedale collie), Elsie declares the clan complete.
On 28 June 1914, as tensions escalate in the Balkans, an assassin’s bullet fells Austria-Hungary’s heir to the Hapsburg throne, Archduke Ferdinand, in Sarajevo, signalling the symbolic beginning of the First World War.
Herb enlists. He gallantly insists Elsie and the boys return to her family in Middleton, Nova Scotia, near the Bay of Fundy; but, for reasons of either flu or flat feet, Herb’s army days are numbered. Instead of returning to Edmonton, however, the couple reasons the family will probably fare better in the flourishing railroad city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, the financial capital of Canada’s West (as well as the home of the Alice Leone Mitchell School of Expression where Elsie elects to pursue her elocutionary studies and hone her oratorical skills training in the “principles of public reading” and dramatic performance).
Herb enters the life-insurance business (and is soon demoted from manager to salesman); Elsie becomes the School of Expression’s top student. In 1921, the McLuhans finally settle into a suitable rental dwelling among the Scots and Irish in Winnipeg’s Fort-Rouge residential district.
Marshall – “Mars” to his copper-topped brother, Maurice (“Red”); “Marsh” or “Mac” to everyone else – is hurting. Elsies disciplined him yet again with the razor strop. Maurice knows the feeling; but, if he doesn’t mind his Ps and Qs, Marshall could well turn on him; so, he keeps his mouth shut and makes himself as inconspicuous as possible. For a minute or two. Then, well, Maurice being Maurice (and almost eight years old), he tries to make the best of things.
“Mars? Marsy?”
“Yeah? What, Red?”
“Are you okay?”
“I’ll live. Don’t worry. I’ll live.”
“Mars?”
“Yeah, Red?”
“Do you want me to help you work on The Lark tomorrow?”
“No, I don’t think so, not tomorrow.”
“Okay, Mars. Okay.”
“Maybe on Sunday, though?”
“Really?”
“Sure. Right after Sunday school. Okay, Red?”
“Okay.”
“Yeah, it’s okay, Red, it’s really okay. See? Nothing’s broken.”
Through the most wonderful as well as the worst years of their young lives, the curious and adventurous McLuhan boys enjoy (or endure) an up-and-down existence in the lively McLuhan household at 507 Gertrude Avenue, passing the days hiking with Herb, looking up and memorizing difficult words in the dictionary, skiing in winter and, during the languid summer hiatus, carousing on the banks of the Assiniboine at one end of Gertrude or swimming in the Red at the other; but, once Mars finishes building The Lark, the inseparable pair spends long hours sailing and rowing on both rivers.
As highly motivated as Elsie is (and Herb is not), the boys’ mother strives to improve her family’s fortunes and offers elocution lessons, a not-uncommon practice at the time. In the years following the First World War, prior to the proliferation of radio, youngsters regularly study public-speaking and dramatic recitation.
Pupils flock to the house on Gertrude, eager to learn proper breathing, enunciation, memorization, articulation, and performance techniques. Elsie doesn’t provide her sons with formal training in elocution, but both pick up plenty by osmosis and remain excellent speakers for the duration (despite Maurice’s feeling he spent much of his early life trying to keep up with his brother).
Maurice, who speaks frequently to church groups, will grow up to become a man of the cloth for several years (before committing himself to the teaching profession). His older brother will grow up to become a man on a mission with a message concerning media in the future, in some far-off time and unimaginable place all will come to call the global village.
Glimmers of McLuhan’s love of devices and machines capable of transmitting words, music, and messages surface. One of the biggest thrills of his adolescent years, in fact, is fiddling with gadgets and such, especially new-fangled gadgets that allow him to tune into the world of radio late at night, picking up stations from as far away as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hundreds of miles southeast of the Manitoba border.
Pittsburgh’s out there, a vibrant metropolis in a huge world just waiting to be investigated, a world filled with wonders as plentiful as stars, a huge and noisy world far beyond Gertrude Avenue except when – with the cooperation of the northern lights – the reception is brilliant and Pittsburgh’s KDKA comes through clean, clear, and wholly spellbinding.
McLuhan spends his after-school hours attending classes to earn his crystal-set operator’s licence. To celebrate his success, he builds a state-of-the-art radio with double sets of earplugs so both he and Red can listen to KDKA before they drift off to sleep but, naturally, not before Mars and Red trade facts they’d studied at school that day:
“The telegraph,