Jack Sheehan on how the inspiring message of longtime Las Vegan Bruce Layne can lift many

Sunday, March 26, 2006 | 7 a.m.

It's hard not to be cynical in these strange times.

We're in a distant war that appears to be heading deeper into a Vietnam-like quagmire, foreigners in nearly every corner of the globe either resent or outright hate our country, political scandals - both national and local - fill the newspapers and lead the evening news, the government-ordained terror thermometer drifts between yellow and orange and as it goes up so does our blood pressure, Paris Hilton is still making magazine covers, and either bird flu or mad cow disease is certain to kill us all sometime in the next decade.

Equally distressing is that we're being told that erectile dysfunction medications may impair vision. (Of course, I heard that from the nuns shortly after I hit puberty. "Stop it or you'll go blind!" they screamed.)

So to avoid having to make an urgent cell phone call to Dr. Kevorkian to get out of this mess, we should all seek an occasional dose of optimism. Whenever I find myself funneling under that dark cloud, I call my friend Bruce Layne.

If Bruce's name is familiar to many of you, I'm not surprised. He's a lifetime resident of Las Vegas, a graduate of Bishop Gorman High School, was a baseball star at UNLV back when it was Nevada Southern University, went on to make millions in the insurance business, and once ran a spirited campaign for Nevada lieutenant governor.

Although he lost that battle, Bruce made scores of friends around the state. His campaign records reveal that he made 140 appearances throughout Nevada during the campaign and gave 110 speeches.

"Bruce was tireless," says his friend and former campaign manager, Bill Wright. "Whenever he spoke he would shake every single hand in the room and engage everyone in conversation. It was just amazing how he could strip away people's opposition and get people to like him within two or three minutes."

At a point in his career, age 55, when he should have been enjoying the fruits of a lifetime of hard and smart work, and just as he was closing a deal to sell his privately owned insurance business for well north of 10 million dollars, life slipped Bruce Layne a moldy fig. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

"I brooded for about a week," he says, "and then I got busy trying to figure out ways to contribute to finding a cure, and doing positive things with the rest of my days."

One of those "things" was to record the valuable life lessons he'd learned along the way in a book, which he would dedicate to his two young grandchildren, Maddie and Garrett Bruce, who belong to Bruce's older son Chad and his wife Diane. A younger son, Trevor, is still reveling in bachelorhood.

By the time in 2002 when I was recruited to help Bruce write his book, his collected notes and newspaper clips looked like a first attempt at origami. When Layne's secretary, Barbara, handed me the stack of scribblings, she rolled her eyes and apologized.

"Good luck," she said, "somewhere in that mess is a great story."

Sure enough, meeting once a week for the next six months, Bruce and I were able to pull that story together. The final result of our efforts, titled "My Gift: The Collected Thoughts of a Wisdom Junkie," has been read by a good segment of the old-guard Las Vegas population, as well as hundreds of young people who have heard Bruce share his uplifting message of "Paying It Forward."

After seeing the movie of that title a few years back, Layne adopted the philosophy as his own. He reasoned that if he could share positive ideas and inspirations that might have a ripple effect on an audience, he could create a geometric progression of acts of goodwill. And that is precisely what has happened with his book. He has given countless speeches and his message brings both laughter and tears to his listeners.

One of the pearls Bruce uses in his talks is a Zen parable of the Buddhist monk who falls from a cliff, and as he clings to a fragile branch which momentarily breaks his plunge to certain death, he pauses to admire the sunlight bouncing off a blossom on the branch and gives praise for the glory of that moment. That is called perspective, and despite his daily battle with a disease that has not yet found a cure, Bruce Layne has plenty of it.

When he hosted a reception for 300 of his closest friends upon the release of his book, Bruce singled out his old baseball coach at UNLV, Chub Drakulich. He brought Chub forward and told the story about how after he'd flunked out of Nevada Southern his first semester in college ("I got straight D's," Layne joked, "and that's not easy to do."), Chub drove out to Henderson, where Bruce was working at a titanium plant.

"What caused him to do this, I'm not certain," Bruce said that night. "But fate certainly had a hand in it. I was just miserable working at the plant. I hated the hours, the lack of meaningful conversation on my breaks, even the grease that got under my fingernails. I went to bed every night with a gut-wrenching fear that I was going to end up a total dud, never reaching anything close to my potential. When Chub told me he wanted me back and that he would give me a scholarship, it was like someone turned the light back on. Career-wise, I look at that moment as the major turning point in my life."

I'll never forget the gratitude etched across Chub Drakulich's face that evening, or the tears that rolled shamelessly down his face.

A few months later Chub died, but his old first baseman had given him a parting gift in keeping with the gesture he'd made some 40 years before. Without realizing it at the time, the coach had paid it forward.