Speak about this event in a Community Setting i can see healing occur in families coming out to talk about it and it gives us a sense of where youre getting this software chess because there were many families, many loved ones still around today who lost loved ones at the time who never spoke about it and now they have an avenue to talk about it. Next, tom brokaw talks about being diagnosed with blood cancer in the diary he kept during his year of treatment. Youll have a chance to talk to mr. Brokaw from our coverage of the book festival in cm december 5th. [inaudible conversations] hardback good evening. Great to have you here. I am patricia lynch. An executive producer of writers on the new england stage in the executive director of the music hall. We are just delighted you are with us for another great author event here at the music hall. Our guest is agassi celebrated journalists, trained to commit visiting with his new book [cheers and applause] hot off the press, a lucky life interrupted. We are still honored this is actually the only book related event he is doing in the country. [cheers and applause] is so much to say about this remarkable man but his batsmen to keep it short and im going to. You know he is a renowned author. Hes an award winner in many, many categories. Hes a favorite of television audiences, a calming voice for years and years. Of course the author of six bestsellers including the latest generation in anymore. Hes also a native of south dakota with a degree in Political Science and began his journalism career in omaha and atlanta before joining nbc news. Mr. Brokaw was the sole anchor and managing editor of nbcs nightly news with tom brokaw from 1983 to 2005. I am just giving you the barest highlights here. He is Still Producing longform documentaries and providing expertise during breaking news events. And hes won every major award in journalism than in 2014, tom brokaw was awarded the president ial medal of freedom. [cheers and applause] tonight mr. Brokaws going to speak to us about his lucky life and he will also talk more about his struggle over the past two years, how since 2013 is that a cancer diagnosis and treatment for multiple myeloma. After he discusses his new book for approximately 20 minutes, hell be interviewed by virginia prescott, New Hampshire public radios Daily Program of emerging ideas and unexpected stories. Of course were always thrilled to have virginia and her team from New Hampshire public radio s. Are part are. [cheers and applause] throughout the coming hour, our wonderful house band, dreadnought, thanks guys, great to see you. Well be playing sounds perfect for us tonight. Check out the playlist in your program. A few other questions youd like to ask mr. Brokaw. They shut it down on the index cards and hand it to a nashua. We will go for just as many as we can. Now i see no writers on the new england stage is a partnership between the musical in New Hampshire public radio. Who will get to work right after this event producing the radio version of what you see tonight. We are grateful for the partnership and also presenting the university of New Hampshire. [applause] r. Series sponsors of the store group of wells fargo is there, a tree service and calypso communication. Media sponsors thank you magazine. Evening sponsors are a very insurance and seacoast area of libraries. Our season sponsors the river house restaurant, and the residents of poor bob plays. New Hampshire Public Radio also wants to think of broadcast sponsor. Lets give them all a hand. [applause] i want to mention that cspan is with us tonight filming for their show booktv. I want to do a special shout out for the transportation and hospitality showing us what our good friend. Now, back to you tonight. Truly this is a lucky night for all of us. Please welcome to the stage are very esteemed guest, tom brokaw. [applause] thank you. [cheers and applause] thank you very nice. That is very generous of you. In fact, it was a lamont battling for me to arrive in New Hampshire today. My body clock was off because its been three years since ive been here. I usually come here for years, so ill be back next year as well for the first in the nation primary. I really do love your stay. I first started coming here in 1972 and ive been coming every four years since then and once in a while in between there as well. I believe i was in the midwest and New Hampshire in the northeast or the too perfect places to launch our president ial camp came. Not everyone agrees with me. The fact is in these two states, you take your submission should seriously. You work hard for what you have and you represent in the regions you are located part of the wolf in north america, the hard shores of New Hampshire for our first settlers came in the deep rich soil of iowa as people begin to migrate across the country and settle first on farms and small villages between these two states we do have a representation of who we are. I always find it reassuring to go back to iowa and then immediately to New Hampshire and watch the great president ial process play out. Next year of course i have to be a little careful. Im getting older. Im not as quick on my feet. I dont know how i stay out of the way of all the republicans running for the president ial nominee. I honestly dont. [applause] let me just quickly tell you about the First Campaign i had to cover in New Hampshire. There is the mayor of los angeles at the time that the name of seniority. Is more republican than democrat, but he decided he would run in the democratic primary here in 1972 to derail george mcgovern. That he was determined not to put in too much time on the campaign trails Suit Campaign in a winnebago at 11 morning at 1 00 in the afternoon have a long nap. At any rate as a Junior Member of the nbc Coverage Team and unfortunately i drew sam your dfa candidate had to traipse around New Hampshire a. One day i was just completely exhaust did mentally and physically by chasing after him knowing he was the going anywhere. When a colleague, friend of mine who is a competitor from cbs came running down the hall, the headquarters in manchester, he was waving los angeles time newspaper and said this will cheer you up. The Los Angeles Times newspaper had a political cartoonist who had won three pulitzer prizes. His name is paul conrad. He had a cartoon that consisted of New Hampshire and rockets on a spigot to meet him. And posters of sam your dion all those trees. And the caption read simply, the sap is running in New Hampshire. [laughter] in fact, he did get me through the next 48 hours. I thought i would take a few moments of your time and tell you why i am here. Its an unexpected reason for my appearance to New Hampshire. Ive had the the luckiest life of anyone i know. In the last 52 years of my life and even before that my friends have said rochon, you report on his lucky star. Id wonderful workingclass parents. We moved around a lot but my parents always gave me the best attention under life is to make it possible for me to go to college. When i was 15 and that to the metropolitan area of south florida. 9000 people. I want them to the and there is a most beautiful young woman id ever seen. She was wellknown in the community. Her name is meredith lowell, daughter of a talker, stunning beauty and great student. We quickly became fast friends although we were never high school sweetheart. Pardon me, there were two reasons for that. She thought a fold around too much and i thought she didnt fool around enough. [laughter] forwarder class president s and vice resident and a homecoming for her. She was a cheerleader and i was a jock in the date very close. I kind of went off the rails in college. I decided that chasing girls and drinking here was going to be my major and that didnt work out area well. Meredith wrote me the harshest possible letter even though we were not involved with one another saying tom, no one understands what you are up to. You are wasting your life and effort they dont want to see or hear from you again. It was so devastating to me i had found out. I say can you believe what shes written to me and he said she is right. We can understand whats going on. I did an immediate turnaround and got my grades in order. I was working fulltime, commuting to school and put myself back together again. Meredith came to mean the library one day and said i was really out of line. I really preach too far with that. I said no, i had it coming. She said why dont we have a cup of coffee. Nine months later we were getting married and i was 53 years ago. So that worked out pretty well. [applause] that was a part of my long, lucky strike that included three fabulous daughters who have their own families now. I caught the way the network news at just the right time with the skills that i had. It has been a long, lucky life. What happens is you begin to think that lucky strike will just continue. So i would like to read from the beginning of this book which will give you the premise of why i brought it and what we were going through. In the seasons of life, i have had more than my share of summers. A long line of sunny days and adventurous nights filled with lucky stars, uninterrupted by great personal calamity, rewarded in ways i that could not have imagined in those formative years on the great plains. Our eldest daughter, jennifer reflecting her training as an emergency room physician. By the way, shes a graduate of the Government Medical school is along for the ride. She was along for the ride, but giving her training she worried. Dad, she would say, we really never had anything go really wrong in our family. I wonder if we could handle it. We were about to find out. In the year 2013, typically about my birthday just go by. Our 73 and much more focused on a bike trip i was taken across argentina and chile with a group of friends im looking forward to a trip to africa where meredith, my wife as a tomato project in malawi where she is teaching native women to canned tomatoes and sell them in the supermarket and mac community. Then i would be covering the final days of nelson mandela, one of the greatest man ive ever countered or not. I would be down where he spent so many years that would be going into the bushes well with a friend of id. I was the home of ben tim russert. He looked at me and said oh i know the two worst things that ever happened to buffalo. [laughter] the death of tim russert and when they got beat in the bowl by the Dallas Cowboys. The dr. Said something is going on here, i went off and began to get my house in order for the Board Meeting the next day and the business we had to do that night as well. Andrew st. Came to me and said what are you come over to my office after lunch today there are a few things i want to go over. I really thought i had a parasite which i pick up from time to time when i travel in the third world so i wasnt thinking much about it and dr. Mike did have kind of a startled expression on his face. The head of internal medicine of mayo clinic came in as well and set out in front of a computer screen and began reading off numbers which sounded to me like an sat test. I didnt understand what he was talking about. Then this is what happened. As he finished his playbyplay he turned to me, uttered a phrase for which i was completely unprepared, you have a malignancy he said. Making no attempt to prepare me for what was coming, he points ahead saying it appeared i had to pull myeloma, the cancer of a plasma cells in the bone marrow adding, you know others have died from this. Frank reynolds the abc anchorman, so so thats what he dido by thought. And joe ferrara jolting for our own the first woman to run for president of the united states, she lived with it for 12 years when the Life Expectancy was much shorter. It is treatable, but is treatable, but it is not curable. Were making progress 50 of the progress has been made in the last five years, i want to review your record overnight to make sure we have this right. Life expectancy i asked, he said statistically five years but we think you can beat that. Frankly i appreciated that unconditional straightahead style, as a scientist in a different called discipline he was a numbers guy. He may have been absent today in his medical school class when they had a seminar bedside manners, but that was not so much an issue for me as it may have been brothers. I was a journalist, i was looking for facts not a cheerful disposition. I think all of us have wondered what we would happen when we heard that type of diagnosis, i quickly learned that i stay calm and initial thought was my familys going to be okay. We just had a review of our financial situation and i had the good fortune to be in a career that has paid me very well, my children were in good shape, they all have their own children, they are in parked on careers and meredith was a very good health. I wondered however how all of this would end. I knew i wouldnt get answered that day, the doctors said we want to review the test one more time, we will talk to the morning. So i walked out of this office, as calm as i could possibly be, as a journalist journalist looking in on tom brokaw the persons age shouldnt you be more angry, shouldnt you be more terrified, shouldnt you be more puzzled . In fact, i felt i was in the hands of the best possible hospital in the world, the mayo clinic, my family was going to be okay and what ever it took i was i was confident i could get the resources to deal with it. The next day they confirm the diagnosis. I did have my noma. I still didnt understand what i was in for so i got on a charter plane and went back to montana and didnt arrived until midnight of the second day. I had not yet told meredith because i didnt want her to know over the phone, we drove through the darkness of the wilderness areas of the mountain in montana back to our little ranch house and i portis diff joint and stat sat at the bedside and said theres something i havent told you. I have a cancer and is called multiple myeloma and is going to change our lives. Meredith gave me what i call her hard stare as if she couldnt quite absorb it. I went on to say to her we will get through this together as we have with everybody else and Everything Else but i have no idea how its going ten. We hugged and with that long life of emotional connection and cal calibration we fell asleep in each others arms. The next day, i did one of the dumbest things i had ever done. I woke up and the pain in my back had been reduced, i had made arrangements to go fishing with friends 155 miles away in montana. I jumped in the bag with i jumped in the car with a bag of ice on my back, by the second day i was curled up on in a friends cabin and pain, i could barely breathe, we made our way back to the ranch. I still didnt tell my friends what i was going through, i was so immobilized by this pain that i would roll out of bed and crawl on my hands and knees to go to the bathroom not wanting to disturb anybody. The pain pills did no good whatsoever. I had to be medevac out of montana, we have great cowboy emts and montana. One was an ex army ranger, they came up into our bedroom, a very narrow staircase much like the older homes in New Hampshire, and they shot me full of demerol, load me into a evacuation chair, help me into the vehicle and drove me 60 miles. I was not in the best shape physically, we are now going i had a great gps and they got me through the trip and i got to the mayo clinic and there of course, i i was in the best chance possible. I was in transfer to new, i was handed off to a brilliant oncologist and a group of senior positions came in while i was there. What happened with doctors is they want to be reassuring, one things i write is out would rather have the hard truth than the reassurance. They said to the man, nine months from now time youre going to be out doing your old thing, that was kind of uplifting for me and it was dead wrong it turns out. I went through a really difficult time, i had four compression fractures in my spine that the dr. Had missed and they are repaired with something called kyphoplasty, they put a needle in your spine and fill those fractures with cement. That was tough enough, meredith looked at me and said you remember when you said you used to be 6 feet 511, you now 59, you lost 2 inches in height. That was tough on my vanity. But we have a wicked sense in the brokaw family my daughters came back and stood eyeball to eyeball with me and said dad youre still the big man of the family. But youre a lot shorter than you used to be. That began a process that went on all through the winter months of 2013 and 2014, i was in and out of the hospital every week getting additional chemotherapy, adding an extra drug when i brought in a man by the name of ken anderson who is one of the great my myeloma specialists in the world. Then i had a terrible fall in our house in upstate new york, it opened up an 8inch gash over my left eye that went all the way to the skull. I began to think, wheres that lucky star everyone was talking about . Maybe it does have a dimmer switch. But switch. But what gave me courage to go on is that our youngest daughter had given birth to a fantastic first grandson of the family. I had been raised by many women. Meredith, three daughters and two of those three daughters each had two girls and suddenly we got a boy. He came for christmas and our youngest daughter sarah said when i realized how sick you were dead, i was at first terrified and angry because hell need you to teach them how to throw a small and how to fly fish and not too many years. That was more more motivation for me. I went through a long spring keeping this news from people as much as possible, only the senior people at nbc news new about it. I was continue to work but mostly on my laptop at home, finishing home, finishing a documentary on the 50th anniversary of john f. Kennedy and preparing for other projects that i hoped i be able to do. When i was doing that documentary before i told anybody what was going on with me, i went on the Dav