Oct 4, 2016 By Harry Funk 3 min read

In writing a book about Morrie Schwartz, all Mitch Albom was looking to do was help pay the medical bills for his old college professor.

Of course, “Tuesdays with Morrie” has gone on to become the world’s largest-selling memoir and is taught in classrooms “from Djarkata to Pittsburgh,” as Albom put it.

Appropriately, the Detroit-based journalist spoke Tuesday, Oct. 4, to kick off the 48th season of the Town Hall South lecture series.

Alternately inspiring laughter and bringing the packed house in the Upper St. Clair High School Theater to the verge of tears, with the occasional gasp of shock or awe, Albom spent an hour discussing Schwartz’s story while imparting a series of life lessons he learned from his late mentor.

“Giving is living” proved to be a recurring theme as Albom related how Schwartz dealt with his diagnosis of and eventual death from ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Schwartz actually told his former student, “Giving makes me feel like I’m living,” and Albom in turn told the audience: “It’s a profound little quote. It also rhymes, which makes it easy to remember.”

When he was 73, Schwartz learned the reason that he was losing control of parts of his body. Rather than give up and face the inevitable, he decided to “try to find something positive in this terribly negative hand he had been dealt,” Albom said. “He decided he could teach what it would be like to die, right up until the day he died.”

The two met when Albom was a freshman at Brandeis University in 1975, and he came close to walking out of the room to drop the sociology class Schwartz was teaching.

“Had I kept going, I guarantee I wouldn’t be standing in front of you right now,” Albom recalled.

The professor and student became friends and spent a lot of time together until Albom graduated from the Waltham, Mass., institution of higher learning. He told Schwartz he would stay in touch.

“I proceeded to break that promise,” Albom said, instead going “16 years without even a phone call.”

In the mid-’90s, he was flipping through TV channels when he saw an episode of ABC’s nightline featuring his former professor, whom he hardly recognized because of his debilitating condition. Albom finally did make that call, started visiting Schwartz every Tuesday, and the rest is publishing industry history.

In the meantime, Albom told about how he as applied Schwartz’s “giving is living” to his own life.

On Jan. 12, 2010, a Magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the impoverished Caribbean nation of Haiti, causing more than 100,000 deaths. In its wake, a Detroit pastor contacted Albom through his radio broadcast, to try to find help in determining the fate of the mission he ran in Haiti’s capital of Port Au Prince.

Albom responded by organizing a trip to the ravaged city.

“When we got there, it was quite literally hell on earth,” he recalled. “The smell of death was literally everywhere you went.”

Suitably inspire to help rebuild the mission, which houses orphans and children whose families cannot support them, Albom eventually took over its leadership. He personally cares for a young girl who is undergoing treatment for brain cancer.

Albom concluded his program by reminding the audience about the importance of reaching out to make the lives of others brighter, as opposed to concentrating on a lifetime of accumulating material possessions.

“Follow your heart,” he said. “It will never lead you astray.”