His office was just as messy as Marshall’s, but considerably less friendly. While reaching into a filing cabinet, and pulling out a red manilla folder, he announced that, “The graduate committee had a couple of issues with your thesis proposal …” He opened the file. “The first problem is the proposal itself. It’s way too ambitious.”

“It’s what I want to do!” said I. “What is the other problem?”

“We don’t think Marshall McLuhan is an appropriate outside advisor.”

“Why?”

“What would they think in the hinterlands, if they learned that Marshall McLuhan was advising a doctoral candidate in Canadian History?”

Without missing a beat, I stood up to announce that I was dropping out, effectively immediately, and leaving a lucrative scholarship behind me.

Once again, I walked across Queen’s Park. This time, my destination was the old Havergal College building at 354 Jarvis Street, which was then national headquarters for CBC English Radio. One of my undergraduate tutors was the Executive Producer of a show called Morningside. I stormed into her office without knocking. She asked me how I was doing. I told her that I’d just dropped out of a doctorate and was looking for a job. She said she couldn’t hire me, but sent me upstairs to a show called IDEAS.

The rest, as they say, is history.

That was the day my career in journalism started. Before leaving the building, I had a verbal contract to make an IDEAS documentary about the fur trade. A year later, I got an unsolicited call, asking me what I wanted to do next. After getting over my initial shock that they didn’t hate my debut documentary, I suggested a show about Innis. The immediate response was literally impossible to believe: How about five shows?

That’s when I decided I would be a journalist forever. It inspired my lifelong loyalty for IDEAS, which has been my home ever since. It’s also where Marshall McLuhan steps back into this story.

I dropped by the Centre for Culture and Technology to tell Marshall my good news – five hours, on IDEAS, about Harold Innis! I told him that I would obviously need to interview him for all five shows. He told me to contact his agent, Mrs. Molinari. The next day, she revealed that the fee would be $10,000. I felt embarrassed to confess that my fee – for the entire series! – was only slightly more than half that much.

“You people at the CBC are always short-changing Marshall. You don’t understand his value to the world.”

I desperately tried to explain that I was a mere freelancer with only a tenuous connection to the CBC. Nobody valued Marshall more than me, but Mrs. Molinari had all the power and she refused to budge. I threw myself into the project, assuming that it would never include McLuhan. The work proved to be both fascinating and fun. “Important” people agreed to give me interviews when they learned the results would be broadcast on IDEAS. Nobody turned me down.

On the night when the first show was broadcast, I was frantically cutting tape and writing script for the second episode, which was scheduled for the following week. A few minutes after 9 p.m. – which is when IDEAS signs off in Atlantic Canada – my phone rang.

“Hello, Paul … this is Marshall. I want to be in your program.”

“I want that, too! I really need you! But you sent me to Mrs. Molinari and she said I’d need to pay $10,000 …”

“Oh, don’t worry about her. She doesn’t understand these sorts of things. Just come around to the house on Sunday afternoon, and we’ll have another chat about Harold Innis.”

Careful listeners would have noticed that Marshall McLuhan appeared in all but the first episode of my five-part series about Innis, but nobody ever mentioned it to me. Nor has it caught the attention of any scholars or theorists who have written books or biographies about the media guru. Maybe that’s appropriate for somebody who considered himself to be no more than a footnote.

Marshall McLuhan saved me from an academic career that would have been way less interesting than the life I’ve had the privilege of living. This is not to suggest that he should be blamed (or praised) for jump-starting my media career. I don’t think he had any idea he was doing so. He was simply being the kind and generous human being that he couldn’t help but be, although you won’t find much about that in any of the biographies either.

I’m just grateful for this belated opportunity to say THANKS!