MARY STROM LARSON

After graduation from RHS, I commuted to the U and graduated in 1965--as a teacher. I'd tried nursing as a nurses aid at the U of M Pediatric Heart Hospital, but couldn't take so many dying children. Since women in our day could be nurses or teachers, I became a teacher.
In 1965 I married Charlie (aka "Whitey") Larson, a 1958 Washburn graduate. While he completed a PhD at the U, I taught Language Arts at Richfield West Junior High. He finished the PhD in Speech in 1968, and searched for professorship in the Twin Cities, but that didn't happen, so he took a position at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb IL--planning to stay just a couple of years and then relocate back to God's Country.
I taught high school English and Speech at Geneva High school--a beautiful little town on the Fox River. The college professor market dried up in the early 1970s, so we bought a small starter home, Charlie carved out a successful niche in Persuasion and Advertising, and I took my turn at graduate school, finishing an MA in Communication Studies in 1971.
I became an instructor at NIU, and our two daughters were born in 1972 and 1973. Fortunately, we had traveled to Europe and much of the US before they were born, because they cramped our style for awhile. I did continue to work on my doctorate in media studies while the girls were young, finished it in 1985 and faced a job market that was not flourishing. I figured that I had done all I could to make myself marketable, and the rest lay with the fates.
When a professor was dismissed for sexual harassment and other sexually inappropriate activities, an opportunity fell into my lap. I had learned how to thread audio and video cables through a television studio to make television productions happen. I had published in scholarly journals, and I was able to teach the technical courses in audio and video production, as well as graduate seminars in the effects of the media on politics, education, health and, especially, on children.
I got the job, and spent the next 25 years as a professor of Media Studies at Northern Illinois University, a school with approximately 25,000 students, located 60 miles directly west of Chicago. I retired in January 2010 after a total of 37 1/2 years teaching at NIU.
My specialty in the study of the effects of the media on children and adolescents has resulted in my trade book, written for parents, grandparents, teachers and caregivers, titled "Watch It! What Parents Need to Know to Raise Media Smart Kids." A big focus of the book is on media literacy for kids--about which I am passionate!
Since retirement we have traveled in spite heath issues that have slowed us down a bit. We enjoy our daughters who live nearby--one in Oak Park IL, the other in Geneva IL, and our twin fourteen-year-old grandchildren.

I remember knowing that there would be no greater heartbreak in our lives than weeping and cheering for Edgerton in the State basketball tournament.