Seeing the World in Our Moments

The Legacy of Jeff Zaslow

Mar 28, 2024

“Tell me who you’re with and I’ll tell you who you are.”
Spanish proverb as quoted by Jeff Zaslow

“They were 11 girls growing up together in Ames, Iowa. Now they are 10 women in their mid-40s, spread all over the country. And they remain the closest of friends.”

Those are the opening lines in “The Ties That Bind,” an essay published in the Wall Street Journal and written by Jeff Zaslow that coincided with the release of the 332-page biography1 he’d crafted on the enduring friendship that shaped the lives of those women.

Known for his column in the WSJ, “Moving On,” with a focus on life transitions, The Girls from Ames began to percolate after he’d written a piece asking, “why women, more than men, have great urges to hold on tightly to old friends.”2 Jenny, one of the Ames girls, sent a response to his column, a missive he describes in the book’s prologue:

“At first, they were just names to me. Karla, Kelly, Marilyn, Jane, Jenny, Karen, Cathy, Angela, Sally, Diana, Sheila. They arrived, unheralded, in my email inbox one morning in June 2003.”

After a time, an email exchange grew into a deeper dialogue drawing in the other women in the friend group. Sensing that their story was both universal and yet one of a kind, with “lessons for the rest of us,” he took on the challenge of bringing the energy and vitality and value of their friendship to the page.3 In the process, he became an odd combination of their confidant as well as journalist. “[A]n archeologist sifting through crumbling prom corsages, looking for meaning.”4

He learned that “[a]s twelve-year olds, they’d sit in a circle, combing one another’s hair. As 17-year olds, they’d go to parties together deep in the cornfields outside Ames.” He learned that their friendship took them well beyond their moves out of Iowa and well beyond the safe predictability of their childhood hometown. One died a mysterious death. There was a daughter diagnosed with leukemia. There was breast cancer.

The story he uncovered, the story he felt “privileged” to tell, like so many of the stories Jeff Zaslow told, was “a celebration of joy, loss, courage and resilience.” And like so many of his stories, its core was the support and sustenance that nurtures all of us through life.

“Being in each other’s company, they feel like they are every age they ever were, because they see themselves through thousands of shared memories.”5

Finding Jeff Zaslow

I first found Jeff Zaslow doing research on Playboy’s cultural reach during the late 1970s. As part of the magazine’s public relations’ blitz, back in the day, current and former Playmates were routinely sent around the country to meet with fans at places like national sporting events and electronic store openings. Car shows seemed a particular favorite and there was no end to the local coverage of the women’s publicity appearances.

The headlines were meant to grab fans’ attention and got right to the point. “Playboy Beauty is Centerfold of Attraction at Show,” “4 Playmates at Car Show,” “Beauties, Playmates Here For Car Show,” “TV’s ‘Boss Hogg,’ Autos, Playmate Shine At Car Show,” “Playmate Promoting Car Show,” and “Auto Show Brings Playmates to Town.”

The write-ups were just as straightforward. “The International World of Wheels Custom Car and Van Show, which begins today and continues through Sunday is bringing more than just unusual cars to the Shreveport area.”6

My longform essay, which centered on how the models were perceived by both the media and by Playboy’s readers, had me working my way through Newspapers.com and I’d come across many auto show ads and articles, including one by Jeff Zaslow, who was then a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and in his first job as a staff reporter. He’d been assigned to cover the World of Wheels at the Orange County Convention and Civic Center, an event featuring Lou Ferrigno, star of TV’s “The Incredible Hulk,” with a guest appearance by Playboy’s 25^th Anniversary Playmate, and he’d titled his feature “The Candy Loving a Centerfold Can’t Show You.”7

“Most men look at a centerfold objectively… But bring her to a car show – where one can smell her perfume, touch her hand, feel her smile, hear her laugh…” Ms. Loving had all the beauty expected of centerfold, yet as Jeff Zaslow told it, “she had more: an affable manner, a determined intellect…” Like his Wall Street Journal article written years later, his detailing was cinematic, panning onto his subject and animating her with life.

Not long after covering the World of Wheels, Jeff Zaslow went to the Wall Street Journal, and established himself with his column, Moving On, “tend[ing] to the hearts of his readers.” There he’d written on everything from a child’s first crush to a dying husband’s last words to his wife, and eventually the column that turned into The Girls from Ames.

A man choosing to research and write about female friendship on a hunch there was something worthy to be learned. It wasn’t because this was an emotional space he found comfortable. He had a friend who ended all their calls with “I love you,” and that made him uneasy.8 Yet he dove into the water of female friendship anyway. His choice said as much about the writer as it did about the subject. Yes, he had three daughter and a stake in understanding. But he also had a reporter’s curiosity about the unknown and its murkiness, coupled with a unique ability to forge connection onto the page. A writer whose “inherent compassion and generosity and humanity always came through loud and clear.”

The Girls From Ames was not Jeff Zaslow’s first book. He’d published compilations of his advice columns, but it was The Last Lecture, his non-fiction debut, the memoir he’d co-written with Randy Pausch, that brought appearances on Oprah. The international bestseller grew out of his decision to drive five hundred miles in each direction to hear Professor Pausch, then terminally ill with pancreatic cancer, deliver an upbeat and humorous presentation for his students; “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” the lecture he knew would be his last.

Mr. Zaslow also collaborated with former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and her husband, now Senator Mark Kelly on their memoir Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope and he’d written on Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who’d lost use of his plane’s engines and landed an Airbus 320 on the Hudson River. His final book was The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters (2011), which had a bridal shop in Fowler, Michigan as the entry to tell stories about parental hopes and dreams. After leaving a bookstore event for The Magic Room, he’d been driving home on a wintery road. A fatal accident.

Jeff Zaslow died too young, at the age of 53.

In the many tributes that followed his death, pages near impossible to read without tears, he was remembered as a journalist who wrote on disparate subjects that all came together around themes of “love, commitment and living in the movement.” His lesson for his readers was taking the time to understand the simple and the obvious – everyday observations that when framed anew, could change someone’s life. If he was going to write about a person, say an aging vaudevillian, that meant sitting across from his subject and looking into his eyes during the interview instead of a Q&A over the phone. “He felt the story would be a little better that way.”

Deleted Scenes and Outtakes: Finding Room for Jeff Zaslow

After unearthing his coverage of Candy Loving’s appearance at the World of Wheels, I can’t say what drove me to look for more of Jeff Zaslow’s work. Likely I’d wanted to see if he’d done similar write-ups for other Playmates and their publicity appearances, and it’s easy to see that his name would readily pop up in a Google search, leading me to the depth and breadth of his writing and all the little pockets of our lives that he found interesting.

While I was able to include Jeff Zaslow’s piece on Candy Loving in the serialized essay, there wasn’t room to include what I wanted to share, which was the joy of discovering his kindhearted, larger than life soul from a piece he’d written over forty years earlier as a staff reporter toiling at the Orlando Sentinel. The journalist himself was an unexpected find from my research on Playboy and feminism and I’d tried, and failed, and tried again to squeeze Jeff Zaslow into my work.

Neck deep in the early drafts of my essay, I was fortunate to stumble on the help and perspective I needed from a podcast interview of Sam Anderson, an amazing writer who can and has written on seemingly the most obscure of topics.

His work includes an article in The New York Times Magazine on the devotees who not only listen to Weird Al Yankovic, but actually attend his concerts. One of his more recent pieces is an interview with the poet, Sharon Olds. Then there’s his book, Boomtown, that laces the birth of Oklahoma City with the fate and fortune of their NBA team, the Thunder. Any subject in his hands takes the reader along on a joy ride of information.

He spoke of “inhaling” everything there is to know on a topic and then having the ability to use only the smallest fraction of it and compared the process to taking in “an epic and glorious landscape … in the wilderness of Alaska” and choosing a few favorite photographs. Counsel I hadn’t realized I was desperate for on how to distill the titanic amount of information one absorbs as background and turn the whole of it into a cogent piece that is actually readable.

So, with great sadness, I understood there were finds from my research, beautiful quotes full of meaning and moments captured in newspaper articles that no one had read in years, and that those would be lost on the cutting room floor.

That would have been the end to all of that, but as it happens, my essay is published on Substack, this wild west of a platform that’s part social media, part curated writing, part why the hell not? And in that ineffable spirit, it seems there might be room here for a few of my favorite deleted scenes and outtakes. Room for a writer who made everyday truths like love and community transformational.