"Socrates of San Francisco"
（Mr. Howard Gossage President, Freeman & Gossage inc. Advertising)
chuukyuu Is there any episode or background story for Prof. Marshall McLuhan when you promoted him?
Mr. Gossage Marshall McLuhan is one of the most important thinkers of our time. When I read his book "Understanding Media", it must be about 4 years ago(1964), I was very impressed by it. So an associate of mine, Dr.Gerald Mason Feigen, and I went to Toronto where he is a professor at the University of Toronto and met him. And I told him that I thought his time had arrived. I was tried to be explaining to people about his theories and thought that he would become very famous very rapidly. And I thought we could help him a little bit and the chief thing that we could do was to expose him to the world. So I took him down to New York. This was about three and half years ago. And we had a cocktail party for him and invited the foremost editors and publishers in New York. They assigned writers and it happened at just the right time and everybody wrote about him and in six months he was a household name. Of course, he would have become famous anyway, but it might have taken longer. We then invited him to a seminar right here in this office and Tom Wolf and other writers came out and covered it. We paid for everything ourselves, for bringing him and his wife here to San Francisco. Why? JUST BECAUSE WE WANTED TO DO IT.
