honours) instead of a first (straight As) on the exam, he feels diminished, unhappy, and deeply chagrined. More than anything else, he feels relief the ordeal’s behind him (since exams have always been his Achilles heel).

      Not without justification, McLuhan believes a graduate with a mere upper second cannot look forward to the benefits, advantages, and prestige a clean first provides; fortunately, his “poor” standing does not deter him in his quest to create a first-class body of work. After all, he reasons, if John Ruskin, who earned a fourth, had achieved greatness without the coveted first to aid him in his pursuits, the odds are in his favour that he, in possession of an upper second, will similarly accomplish great things.

      By all accounts, McLuhan has come by his solid and sturdy strength of character honestly, several decades earlier, growing up deeply committed to excellence and wholly determined to make his mark. The young Canuck from the Prairies would, one way or another, indeed prove he was, in his mother’s words, “clearly destined for greatness right around the globe.”

3

       A Professor is Born

      The role of advertising is not merely to sell good products but rather to confirm your own good judgement in buying them.

      – Marshall McLuhan

      The live-it-up attitude of the 1920s’ Jazz Age was, in large part, responsible for the catastrophe looming on the horizon of the next decade. With industry producing vast quantities of assembly-line goods for the first generation of women to embrace short skirts, makeup, cigarettes, and alcohol as well as the first generation of mobile family men in need of the latest inventions (radios, iceboxes, toasters, etc.) in automobiles to transport them to their offices, demand exceeds supply; but, short years later, the economy tanks, sinking demand.

      McLuhan strikes a professorial pose at Canada’s Assumption College.

      Black Tuesday, the 29 October 1929 stock-market crash (complicated further by “dust-bowl” droughts in the West), first plunges the continent, then the globe, into the Great Depression.

      This is a devastating time of mass hunger, homelessness, and poverty with unemployment rates skyrocketing from 9 to 30 per cent and wages plummeting by 60 per cent. When stock prices drop 40 per cent, hundreds of banks close their doors and wickets, thousands of businesses declare bankruptcy, and millions of dollars in savings accounts go up in smoke (or dust).