BOOO NOTES: A lifetime and legacy in ‘Last Lecture’

By JOAN RUDDIMAN Special Writer
    Much as been written and shared via the Internet, personal conversations and in print about Randy Pausch’s last lecture. Now, with “The Last Lecture” (Hyperion, 2008) as a national best seller, can anything more be said?
    I think so. Several of my avid reading friends have missed the story and the book, and many who have read the book don’t know the back story.
    Randy Pausch, Ph.D., was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who decided, when he was diagnosed in August 2007 with terminal pancreatic cancer, to deliver a last lecture to his students and colleagues. Jeffrey Zaslow, a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, went to cover the event at Carnegie Mellon in September and ultimately co-wrote the book with Professor Pausch.
    The lecture — in tone and substance — was nothing Mr. Zaslow expected. Neither was the man on the stage in front of more than 400 of his friends and his “work family” who did pushups, told jokes, and regaled the crowd with stories in what Mr. Zaslow writes “turned out to be a rollicking and riveting journey through the lessons of life.” In that lecture, Professor Pausch employed his technological talents in creating his “lifetime in laptop” that projected images on a giant screen, which punctuated the 70-minute message he saw as a legacy for his three children, then only 5, 2 and an infant.
    That first article, “Beloved Professor Delivers the Lecture of a Lifetime,” ran in the WSJ on Sept. 20, 2007. Thus began a chain of events that led to a book that deserves to become a classic.
    Professor Pausch, known to everyone as Randy, was a popular professor appreciated as a task master who got the best from his students. He was one of the leading teachers of video game and virtual reality technology. At Carnegie Mellon, he helped to develop a software program, whimsically named “Alice,” that allows people to easily create 3D animations. It had more than a million downloads last year, reports Mr. Zaslow.
    Those close to him, and now the world, know Randy Pausch as a man who believed in dreaming big and who had a philosophy of life that supported those dreams. As proud as he was of his technological legacies, he was more concerned about leaving his life lessons as a legacy for his young children.
    It was fortunate for Professor Pausch that he met Jeffrey Zaslow, who brings more than reporting skills to their joint endeavor. From 1987 to 2001, Mr. Zaslow worked for the Chicago Sun-Times as the replacement for Ann Landers — a job he won over 12,000 other applicants. In 2000, he won the Will Rogers Humanitarian Award for his work as a columnist.
    Mr. Zaslow wrote in a WSJ special feature — “A Final Farewell,” as the book was being released — that he almost didn’t make the lecture.
    Because Mr. Zaslow writes about life transitions in a column titled “Moving On,” the WSJ’s Pittsburgh bureau chief called him thinking that Professor Pausch’s lecture would be “fodder for a story.” Mr. Zaslow spoke with Randy the day before the lecture and was intrigued with the humor and openness in the man. He writes, “ … it’s hard to know what to say to a dying man. But Randy found ways to lighten things up.”
    When Mr. Zaslow’s editors balked at paying the plane fare from his home base in Detroit to Pittsburgh, suggesting a follow-up phone interview, instead, Mr. Zaslow writes, “I sensed that I shouldn’t miss seeing his lecture in person, and so I drove the 300 miles to Pittsburgh.”
    He notes, “Like others in the room that day, I knew I was seeing something extraordinary.”
    What he didn’t realize then was just how extraordinary. When wsj.com posted highlights, and then the full 70- minute talk was posted on thelastlecture.com, “Randy was soon receiving e-mails from all over the world.” The lecture was translated into other languages, screenings were held and then repeated by demand at a university in India. Oprah reprised part of his talk on her show. ABC News named him one of its three “Persons of the Year.”
    With his health still intact, Randy decided to act on his wife Jai’s suggestion from years before that he should compile his advice for herself and their children in what she had fondly dubbed “The Manual.”
    Palliative chemotherapy had bought him some time — “This will be the first book to ever list the drug Gemcitabine on the acknowledgments page,” he joked — but he did not want to spend that precious time away from his family.
    “So he came up with a plan,” writes Mr. Zaslow, who would become Randy’s scribe.
    Daily exercise was critical to his health, so Randy decided he could talk to Mr. Zaslow by phone each day as he biked around his neighborhood.
    The book — like the lecture — Randy intended for his children. He shared with Mr. Zaslow that his greatest sadness was not what he is going to lose, but that Dylan, Logan, and Chloe wouldn’t grow up with their father. For a man raised by parents who not just loved him, but nurtured his genius (the book is filled with charming and revealing bits of what good parenting looks like), not being able to do the same for his children was at times more than he could bear.
    “Last Lecture” is far beyond Mitch Albom’s “Tuesdays with Morrie” and others of the “last lessons” genre. When Randy walked on the stage at Carnegie Mellon, he was met with a standing ovation. He waved the audience to please sit. “Make me earn it.”
    He did. His audience that day, Mr. Zaslow writes, felt “so introspective and emotionally spent — all at once saddened and exhilarated.” The book captures that extraordinary range of emotion as it reveals the huge spirit of this remarkable young man.
    Randy lost his fight with cancer in July. His legacy, however, will long live on for his family and so many more in “The Last Lecture.”
Joan Ruddiman, Ed.D., is the coordinator/facilitator of the gifted and talented PRISM program at the Thomas R. Grover Middle School in the West Windsor-Plainsboro School District.