Pittsburgher of the Year Randy Pausch:
His "Last Lecture" Lives On
LOVE AND MARRIAGE
Pausch had not always been such a family man. A bachelor until age 39, "he had experience in dating," says older sister Tammy Mason of Lynchburg, Va. When Pausch met 31-year-old Jai Glasgow in the fall of 1998 at the University of North Carolina -- she was a graduate student in comparative literature, and he was giving a guest lecture on virtual reality -- he found that his reputation as a Don Juan preceded him.
Pausch was immediately smitten with the tall, striking brunette. Because she had been married once before, Glasgow was wary. "Having been divorced and remarried myself, if you have gone through a failed marriage, you become extraordinarily careful with your heart. You don't want to get yourself hurt again," Mason explains.
Glasgow agreed to meet Pausch for a drink at a Chapel Hill wine bar (although he didn't drink), and they dated long-distance for months. Professing his love for her that spring, Pausch asked Glasgow to move to Pittsburgh and marry him. Her response? To put up "the most formidable brick wall I ever came upon," Pausch recalled in his memoir. Reeling, he turned to his parents for help. They advised him to be patient and supportive, to consider the situation from her point of view. About a week later, she called. She was flying to Pittsburgh to be with him. The brick wall was coming down. "I waited until I was 39 to get married because it took me that long to find someone whose happiness meant more to me than my own," Pausch recalled in his memoir. "As corny as it sounds, Randy was madly, irrationally, adoringly in love with Jai," echoes Pausch's close friend Steve Seabolt.
Randy and Jai Pausch were married on May 20, 2000, beneath a 100-year-old oak tree on the lawn of the Frick Art & Historical Center in Point Breeze. She wanted a small, intimate ceremony. Always a showman, he wanted something big and dramatic. Here was the compromise: After the ceremony, the couple lifted off in a hot-air balloon. "It's like a fairy-tale ending to a Disney movie," the bride exclaimed. Unfortunately, their balloon drifted far off course, and they found themselves unable to land. The balloon finally touched down that night, perilously close to an oncoming train. They ran for their lives.
Ever since childhood, Pausch had found his often-oversized dreams threatened by obstacles and barriers. He chose the brick wall as one of the central metaphors of his personal philosophy. "Brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They're there to stop the other people," he said during his last lecture. Pausch attributed much of his success in achieving his childhood dreams, despite the many brick walls he faced, to the good start he got in life. He called it "winning the parent lottery."
A LIFE BEGINS: MEET RANDOLPH FREDERICK PAUSCHK PAUSCH
Randolph Frederick Pausch was born on Oct. 23, 1960, in Columbia, Md., a middle-class suburb of Baltimore. His father, Fred Pausch, was a lawyer and insurance-company executive. His mother, Virginia, taught English. Like author Annie Dillard's childhood home in Pittsburgh, Pausch's was full of books. "Growing up, I thought there were two types of families," Pausch wrote in his memoir, "those who need a dictionary to get through dinner and those who don't." Family dinners were the scene of many "lively discussions and debates about philosophy, religion and morals," explains Tammy Mason. Their father taught them to thrive on competition, and it was a lesson "we both took deeply into our souls," she stresses.
"Randy in his heart really wanted to be the smarter of the two, and he strived very hard to achieve this goal," she continues. "By age 7, he could read something and recall it word for word, thought for thought. I am no slouch, but I could not keep up with him." Although the two siblings "fought like cats and dogs," they did collaborate on the design of what could be considered Pausch's first virtual environment -- his bedroom.
Halfway through high school, Pausch asked his parents' permission to paint the walls of his bedroom with "things that matter to me." Although his mother fretted briefly about resale value, both parents consented as a way to encourage his creativity. With the help of his sister and lifelong friend Jack Sheriff, he painted a quadratic equation ("You can spot the nerds early," Pausch joked in his last lecture); a rocket ship; an elevator door and a scene from Greek mythology. The latter in the list is worth explaining further.
Pandora was the woman given the box containing all evil. As the story goes, when she opened the box, evil rushed out and invaded the world. In Pausch's childhood painting, however, Pandora's box opened to reveal not a holocaust but a single word: "Hope." A joke, perhaps, like the glib word-paintings of artists Cary Leibowitz and Sean Landers, but the picture was possibly more, possibly the early makings of Pausch's personal philosophy -- the notion that even in the darkest abyss one can still have hope.
(Years later, after meeting Pausch and hearing him tell this story on her TV program, Oprah Winfrey would encourage parents to allow their children to paint their rooms.)
HIGHER EDUCATION
After high school, Pausch attended Brown University in Rhode Island. On the Ivy League campus, Pausch's self-confidence and frank speaking style impressed some but annoyed others. His sophomore roommate, Stephen Beck, recalls how Pausch had urged him to be more assertive in order to get ahead in the competitive field of computer science. "Get visible. Get involved with cutting-edge technology. Get your ass on that new machine," he remembers Pausch's telling him. "He had the ability to give good advice in very blunt terms that people needed to hear. At 19, he had vision."
To get ahead in Brown's computer-science department, a student could work for professor Andy van Dam, the department chair and something of a mythical figure in his own right. Pausch's fellow students urged Van Dam not to hire him as a teaching assistant in one of his classes, calling him "arrogant." In truth, "he could come off as arrogant, even domineering and intimidating because he was so cocksure and a bit sarcastic, but he clearly meant well," Van Dam concedes. Looking back on when the two met, Van Dam recalls, "I decided I could tame him. He was a diamond-in-the-rough, and my job was to polish him a little."
After Pausch earned his bachelor's degree in computer science in 1982 from Brown, Van Dam encouraged him to get a Ph.D. and become a professor. In addition to brains, "he had the gift of gab. He was such a good salesman that I told him he might as well be selling something worthwhile, like education," says Van Dam, who advised Pausch to apply to Carnegie Mellon, where most of his best students went. Pausch applied and was rejected. Finally humbled, he went to meet Nico Habermann, then-chair of CMU's computer-science department, to plead for admittance "with all the deference my young, arrogant self could muster," Pausch recalled in his memoir. He got in.
Pausch would not publicly reveal the story of his initial rejection by Carnegie Mellon until the very day he set foot on stage to deliver his last lecture there. "I should have been telling that story for years," he mused in his memoir, "because the moral is: If you want something bad enough, never give up."
BEGINNING A CAREER IN TEACHING
After finishing his doctorate in computer science in 1988, Pausch left Carnegie Mellon for the University of Virginia, where he would hold a teaching position for nearly a decade. He spent the last two years of his career at UVA on sabbatical at the Disney Corp., helping the company to develop virtual-reality entertainment. Pausch had dreamed of working for Disney ever since childhood, and he would serve as a consultant to the company his entire career. At one point, the company offered to hire him full-time, but teaching was too much of a lure.
"He lived for the students," explains close friend and fellow Carnegie Mellon professor Don Marinelli. Pausch returned to CMU in 1997 to teach computer science and human-computer interaction, and he quickly stood out in the classroom. "There was obvious fun in everything he did, and he had the ability to give a great demo," says Brown's Van Dam. Example? Every time Pausch taught a new class on user-interfaces, he would pound a VCR into bits with a sledgehammer. His point was unmistakable: VCRs were designed to frustrate users. His technology-design students would have to do better than those nearly forgotten devices.
Pausch became the first CMU professor to win the prestigious Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. Eventually, his Building Virtual Worlds class, culminating in an annual showcase of student experiments with virtual-reality entertainment, became so popular that students had to wait for several years just to get a spot on the roster.
Carnegie Mellon senior Madeleine Pitsch, 21, of Virginia, a former student of Pausch's, describes him as a "really inspiring teacher who had faith in your abilities and would push you." His approach to motivating students was reminiscent of the leadership style of his boyhood hero, James T. Kirk, fictional captain of the starship Enterprise on "Star Trek." Just as Capt. Kirk frequently pushed his chief engineer to exceed his (and the ship's) limits, "If I told professor Pausch that I was struggling to do a project in one week, he'd tell me I could do it in three days," says Pitsch.
Even in the midst of cancer treatment -- in 2006 Pausch underwent a "Whipple procedure," during which Pittsburgh surgeon Dr. Herbert Zeh removed his gallbladder, part of his pancreas, part of his stomach and most of his small intestine -- he remained dedicated to his students. Pitsch was amazed when Pausch e-mailed her after receiving chemotherapy to schedule a meeting to discuss her work. Before he died, Pausch assigned her to the project he cared most about: the Alice computer program, named after the heroine in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.