Author and humanitarian Mitch Albom on love, hope and second chances

John Yang:

Finally tonight, a sports writer turned author turned benefactor who puts love and hope at the center of nearly everything he does in our weekend spotlight, Mitch Albom.

Mitch Albom, Author, "Twice": This is the big that Hudson New Hudson building.

John Yang (voice-over):

Spending the day with Mitch Albom in Detroit is not a leisurely experience.

Mitch Albom:

We try to keep everything happy.

John Yang (voice-over):

At Detroit Water Ice Factory, the nonprofit dessert store he started to help fund his humanitarian work, he whips up a Motown twist with his namesake Mr. Mitch's chocolate peanut butter.

Then a stop at say, Detroit Play, a one-time abandoned city rec center that Albom transformed into a multimillion dollar learning center for hundreds of school students where academics come before play.

Mitch Albom:

We're not going to build something that's good enough for a poor neighborhood in Detroit. We're going to build something that's good enough for the best neighborhood in all of Michigan. If you deliver high expectations, you'll get high performances. If you come in with low expectations, oh, this is good enough. That's exactly the performances you're going to get.

And all I did was kind of, you know, kind of get it going, you know, but they take the ball and run with it and it's, you can see it's a lot of joy there.

John Yang (voice-over):

While there, the one-time professional musician shows us his talents on the piano. He's never had a lesson.

Mitch Albom:

Got to know your Flintstones.

John Yang (voice-over):

In between stops, he takes a call from the orphanage he's run in Haiti since after the devastating 2010 earthquake.

Mitch Albom:

This is actually my second time around in life.

John Yang:

All of that is before or two hours behind a microphone for his long running daily afternoon radio show on Detroit station WJR. And after the three hours every morning that he devotes to writing.

Albom's books have sold 42 million copies. His latest, a novel entitled "Twice," was published this week. It's about a boy who can go into the past in order to have a second chance at things, except when it comes to love. So your protagonist, Alfie Logan from Philadelphia, you're a Philly boy. You started out as a musician, turned to writing. Are there other similarities?

Mitch Albom:

Yes. Most of Alfie's screw ups with girls were based on personal experience. And Alfie has the power to go back in time, redo things.

Mitch Albom:

So there's a scene in the book where he goes up to this cute blonde girl who he kind of has a crush on, and he starts talking with his hands and hits a glass of milk and knocks it into her lap. And she looks up with that, oh, my God. And he just says, look at that, and walks away. And that is exactly what happened to me.

If you want to write about a teenager with embarrassing moments in his romantic life and you already have them in your own life, why not use them? Why make up something else if they work?

John Yang:

Tell us how he discovers he's got this.

Mitch Albom:

Yeah, they're living in Africa. And he is supposed to sit with his mother, who's sick, and she's in one of those mosquito netting beds. And he goes and sees that she's sleeping and his father's out, and he says, well, she's sleeping. I'll just go out and play. And he realizes his mother died while he was out. And he's so upset by this that when he wakes up the next morning, it's the day before, and his father says, go sit with your mother. And he goes, what do you mean, go sit with your mother? And he walks in and she's there again, and it's replaying all over.

But it was a very poignant scene for me because my mother had a stroke and then a series of strokes that robbed her of the ability to speak for the last several years of her life. And so I never had that last conversation with her because I didn't know the stroke was coming.

And then I had gone out to see her and I flew back home. And when I landed, I got a phone call that she had died while I was in the air. And there's a line in the book that says Alfie, who was running around with a cape, a Superman cape on, just jumping up and down. And he says, my mother died while I was trying to fly. And I don't think most people will know him, maybe I'm telling you, but my mother died while I was flying.

And so, yeah, that scene kind of choked me up a little bit. Set the stage for the book, though.

John Yang (voice-over):

It was as a Detroit Free Press sports columnist in the 1980s that Albom first gained prominence. His 1997 worldwide bestseller, "Tuesdays with Morrie," brought broader recognition. An account of his weekly visits with a beloved former professor who was dying. It's one of the bestselling memoirs of all time.

Mitch Albom:

I just start with what I want to write about and then I create a story around it. So, for example, the five people you meet in heaven, people have always thought, oh, you want to write about heaven after Morrie. And that wasn't really true. I wanted to write a story about people who think they don't matter.

So I kind of picked themes before I start. And theme for this one was the "Grass is Always Greener." And I wanted to write a book that showed that even if you had the ability, the magical ability to go back in time and change it, you might find a whole new set of problems, and you might find that you miss what you learned from what you thought was a mistake.

John Yang (voice-over):

While not all love stories, many of Albom's books have lessons about love, hope, and optimism.

John Yang:

So many of my friends I told I was coming to do this said, what they love about your books is the sense of hope and optimism that runs through all of them.

Mitch Albom:

Yeah.

John Yang:

In America today, with so much division, so much — so many troubles, is it hard to keep that hope and optimism?

Mitch Albom:

No, I actually find it's more necessary and it's somewhat easier because it's almost a counter to what's going on. I think that everybody wants hope and everybody wants inspiration. When people take out their wallets, they pull out a picture of their grandson or their child or whatever. They don't pull out a picture of their woe or their misery or how awful life is. Here, let me show you how awful, how dark life is. They aspire to hope.

John Yang (voice-over):

Since 2010, Albom has been giving hope to hundreds of impoverished orphans in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He and an army of volunteers rebuilt an orphanage heavily damaged by the earthquake. He spends a week there every month.

Mitch Albom:

I did not know what I was doing. I'll admit that at the beginning, I didn't have children of my own. I didn't even know diaper changing or a lot of that stuff. But I learned it. And the kids are the absolute joys of our lives and the purpose for myself and my wife. I'm sure that were put on this earth.

John Yang (voice-over):

Albom and his wife of 30 years, Jeanine, became parents to two children from Haiti. Just one instance when he says he's been given a second chance.

Mitch Albom:

So there's more to this than just a love story in a novel. I have come to realize that my life has been the embodiment of second chances. If you look at it from 30,000 feet, you know, I was a musician, and I thought, that's all I want to do. And I failed at it. And I kind of took up writing because there was nothing else to do.

But look at what writing has given me. We don't have children. We get married late. Doesn't happen for us. We figure out we're not going to — we're going to be a couple that doesn't have children. And then this little. Then an orphanage comes into our lives. And then this little girl named Chica needs our help because she has a brain tumor, and she becomes our daughter for two years. And then we lose her. And we figure, oh, my goodness, you know, that was our chance. That was our child.

And then a few years ago, a little girl is brought to us who weighs six pounds at six months and has had nothing to eat but sugar water. And I hold her in my hand, and she fits in one hand and her eyes are closed and she can't speak and she can barely move. We don't think. We just say, well, we have to save her life. She's our little girl. And we have the second chance with another beautiful little child full of life.

What did I do to deserve all these second chances? Who's watching over me that's saying, you're on this way, but we're going to take you this way. So this is kind of a celebration of what life can be like if you understand what went wrong with the first time and you try to make it right the second time. And I am a walking example of that.