1928–1993 · American media scholar and educator; a Jesuit priest until 1969
John M. Culkin Jr. met Marshall McLuhan at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and became his most effective American advocate: in 1964 he brought McLuhan to Fordham University for a year, and in 1969 he left the Jesuit priesthood to found the Center for Understanding Media, named after McLuhan’s book. He spent his career arguing that children should be taught to read film and television as seriously as print. He is the person named in the earliest close match to this saying — though the writer who named him, Howard Gossage, later found the line’s primary authorship genuinely hard to trace, so this is the best-documented credit rather than a settled one.