by Annette Wood
As Temple used it regularly, she noticed distinct changes in herself. “I speculated that the regular use of the squeeze machine may help change some of the abnormal biochemistry, caused by the lack of comforting tactile stimulation in my early childhood.”
Gradually, she was able to accept a pat on the shoulder or a handshake. All her life, she had stiffened at such contact, even if it was brief. Now, she found herself able to respond a little.
In this era of Freudian thought, the staff, some of her friends, and even her mother suggested all kinds of sexual implications, which only made her feel guilty. Fortunately, she had Mr. Carlock to encourage her. She was on the way to discovering a soothing resource of help for autistics, who react to touch with “tactile defensiveness,” or hypersensitivity. (Today, many classrooms for autistic children use the “hug machine.”)
From her experience with the squeeze machine, she found she was able to feel for others. Slowly, she started to have feelings of empathy, usually lacking in autistics. “From the time I started using my squeeze machine, I understood that the feeling it gave me was one I needed to cultivate toward other people,” Temple said.1
She credits the machine with helping her to develop empathy. When she uses it, her thoughts often turn to her mother, her favorite teachers, and others who’ve touched her life in a positive way. “I feel my love for them and their love for me.”
While at Franklin Pierce College, Temple took a course on genetics from Professor Burns. He taught the model Gregor Mendel had developed in the nineteenth century. In this model each parent contributes half the genes to an offspring. Species gradually change through a long series of random genetic mutations. Temple knew that couldn’t be the whole explanation for passing down traits. She gave the example of a Border collie and a springer Spaniel that bred. All the puppies looked like a mixture of the two breeds, but not exactly half and half.2
In my family, there are five children. None of us look or act alike. A teacher who had four of us marveled at how different we were. One time at a basketball game, somebody asked my mother if we all had the same father. Someone else leaned over and said, “Do any of your children have the same father?” We all have the same father, but apparently our parents had a wide variety of genes. The shortest child is five feet two inches, the tallest is six feet three and a half inches, and our coloring differs.
In the sixties while Temple attended college, things were happening in the autism community that would eventually affect everyone living with a person with autism. In 1967 Bruno Bettelheim’s book, The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, appeared in print. By 1969, Bettelheim’s book had sold more than fifteen thousand hardcover copies—an impressive number for a book stating that autism was the parent’s fault.
Bettelheim, who was regarded as one of the world’s most important and influential psychotherapists, found an audience for his views. Unfortunately, his message was: “Throughout this book, I state my belief that the precipitating factor in infantile autism is the parent’s wish that his child should not exist.”3 This view outraged parents of autistic children, but it prevailed for years.
Only later was it discovered that Bettelheim had falsified his credentials when he moved to the United States in 1939. (Richard Pollak, author of The Creation of Doctor B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim, publicized that Bettelheim had lied about his credentials, but not until 1997.)
My sister Jan was diagnosed with autism in 1958, a time when the general public had not heard about it. My parents didn’t say much about it, but I remember my shock when I read the words “childhood schizophrenia,” which was often used as an alternate to “infantile autism.” I was nine when I read this in a report from Dr. Helmer Myklebust, who had evaluated Jan in Chicago. I can only imagine my parents’ horrified reaction. It must have been similar to that of other parents whose child was diagnosed with autism at the time.
In 1967, Bernard Rimland, PhD, a professional research psychologist, founded the Autism Research Institute in San Diego, California. His son Mark, who was born in 1956, had screamed for hours every day as a baby and a toddler. He ignored his parents, but “rocked constantly in his crib, often banging his forehead on the headboard.” Change infuriated the boy, and he threw frightening tantrums when his mother, Gloria, came near him in a new dress. She solved the problem by buying several dresses of the same pattern from Sears for herself, her mother, and her mother-in-law—the only people who were willing to cope with Mark’s behavior.4
At the time, the idea that bad parenting caused autism still reigned. Not only were parents dealing with a child whose difficulties they didn’t understand, they were being blamed for their behavior. Like other parents of autistic children, Dr. Rimland decided this made no sense, and he was in a position to disprove this theory. He started reading everything he could find on autism. And he started writing.
In 1964, Prentice Hall published Bernard Rimland’s Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior. Dr. Rimland concluded that “no evidence existed to support that autism was caused by bad parenting.”5 He found significant research suggesting that autism was an organic disorder. As a professional research psychologist, Rimland was the first authoritative voice to dispute the “refrigerator mother” theory, which held that autism was the result of lack of maternal affection or warmth. (Rimland was familiar with Bettelheim’s theories, though Bettelheim hadn’t yet published his book.)
Now parents of autistic children had someone with clout to support what many already knew. Parents from all over the United States began to write to Dr. Rimland. Some of the families met in Teaneck, New Jersey, to discuss their concerns. From this group came the Autism Society of America.
The organization held its first annual meeting in 1969 on the July weekend when most of the nation was watching the moon landing. Neil Armstrong announced one giant leap for mankind at the same time that four hundred registrants were listening to presentations by leading authorities in the field of autism.6
Leo Kanner, who had discovered autism, was among them. He reminded the audience that since the 1940s he had suspected that autism had an organic base. He even commented “with feeling” that “I herewith especially acquit you as parents.”7
Temple’s mother, though not in the audience, was definitely not a refrigerator mother. Temple’s mother always told her daughter: “Be proud you’re different. You’ll achieve more.”
And achieve Temple did. In the spring of 1970, she graduated from Franklin Pierce College. She credited the squeeze machine with her improvement in socializing. She worked on the school’s talent show, constructing and painting almost half the sets. “It was easier to make contact with other people while doing an activity we all were interested in,” said Temple.8
Temple wrote about her squeeze machine in a paper for her final essay in a marriage and family class. She wrote: “God, whatever that is, and chance formed the gene structure that made me, and something happened in the process which disconnected the ‘wire’ in the brain that attracts a child to its mother and other humans offering affection.”9
She speculated that maybe God wanted it that way so she would invent something that helped other people with the same sensitivity to touch that she had.
Temple graduated with a B.A. in psychology, second in a class of four hundred. No one yet knew what an extraordinary gift she would be to the world.
CHAPTER 4
TEMPLE IN THE SEVENTIES
After Temple graduated from Franklin Pierce College, she returned to Arizona to work on her master’s degree. All her life, she’d had a deep connection to animals and she hoped to work with them, but she entered Arizona State University for graduate work in psychology.
She wanted to do her master’s thesis on the behavior of cattle in feedlots on different types of cattle chutes. Her adviser at Arizona State University didn’t think that was an appropriate academic subject. This was the early 1970s and resea
rch on animal behavior was nearly nonexistent. Thanks to Temple, the animal-behavior field would soon be transformed—but no one knew that at the time.
She didn’t discourage easily, but she had to find someone to advise her on her thesis. Temple found Dr. Foster Burton, chairman of the construction department, and Mike Nielson from industrial design. Both were interested and agreed to guide her.1
Temple was only in graduate school part-time. She also worked part-time as a cattle chute operator. The first time she went to a feedlot and operated a cattle chute on a hundred and thirty head of cattle with three other workmen was the hardest. The animals were given full treatment: branding, shots, and castration. She felt relieved when she didn’t come unglued.2 In fact, though she was a woman from a wealthy family in Boston, she felt like she belonged. “You’re some worker,” one of the men complimented her.
At the end of her second year in graduate school, Temple switched her major from psychology to animal science. By that time, she had spent much effort and energy visiting cattle feedlots and slaughterhouses in Arizona to learn how to design cattle-handling facilities.
Temple tuned in to cows and their feelings of fear and anxiety. She suspected her nervous system resembled a cow’s, and she identified with them. By touching and reassuring them, she showed respect for the animals’ feelings. She discovered she always knew when an animal was in trouble.
She demonstrated her strong feelings for cattle as she fed cows out of her hand and touched them affectionately. She often laid her head on a cow. “Pressure is calming to the nervous system of a cow or an autistic person,” said Temple.
“Animal behavior was the right field for me, because what I was missing in social understanding I could make up for in understanding animals,” she said. “Autism is a kind of waystation on the road from animals to humans.”
She exhibited her comprehension of animals time and time again. “I credit my visualization abilities with helping me [to] understand the animals I work with. Early in my career, I used a camera to help give me perspective as they walked through a chute for their veterinary treatment.”
Temple knelt and took pictures through the chute from the cow’s eye level. No one had ever done that before. She discovered what the cows were afraid of: a discarded soda bottle, a shadow, a moving vehicle. This was an important find. Time and time again throughout her career, she would be called in to find out why cows refused to move.
According to Temple, “Details are extremely important. A huge amount of my consulting business is getting paid to see all the stuff normal people can’t see.
“Animals and autistic people don’t have to be paying attention to something in order to see it. Things like jiggly chains pop out at us and grab our attention whether we want them to or not.”3
Few people had heard of autism in the 1970s. They only knew Temple radiated weirdness. She was “always hunched over, wrung her hands and had an excessively loud, unmodulated voice.” She dressed inappropriately and her underarms stank, sometimes permeating the air around her. From her grade school days, people frequently called her “Tape Recorder” because she talked incessantly, repeating stories and phrases over and over.
Temple saw that her isolated social life was symbolically epitomized in an image of glass. “She was a graduate student in her twenties, washing the bay window of a cafeteria, which consisted of a series of glass sliding doors. Slipping between the two doors to clean them, Temple suddenly found herself trapped inside. ‘It was almost impossible to communicate through the glass,’ she writes. ‘Being autistic is like being trapped like this.’”4
I did not meet Temple until the 1990s at a conference for parents and teachers dealing with autistic preschoolers. This was after she had a reputation as an expert in both the autism and animal behavior fields. Her ideas were good, but I was startled by her strangeness. I can only imagine the reaction of people in the 1970s who knew nothing about her.
Several mentors accepted Temple for who she was and guided her through the world of stockyards and meat-packing plants. “Tom Rohrer, the manager of the Swift meat-packing plants, and Ted Gilbert, the manager of the Red River Feedlot (John Wayne’s Feedlot), allowed me to visit their operations every week. They recognized my talents and tolerated my eccentricities,” she recalled.5
Emil Winnisky, the construction manager at Corral Industries, a large feedlot in Arizona, recognized Temple’s talents and helped her dress more appropriately. He had one of his secretaries go shopping with her. He also plunked down a jar of Arid deodorant on Temple’s desk and said to her, “Your armpits stink.” Though Temple resented it at first, she later realized Winnisky had done her a favor.
While she was at the construction company, she learned drafting from Davy, a shy loner who drew beautifully. Davy gave her suggestions on the tools to use for drafting. Temple was a talented artist. With her extraordinary visual skills, she was able to see cows moving through the system in her head. She could rotate the image and make it move in her mind like a movie.
Temple always visualizes an object before she draws it. “When I’m drawing a blueprint, remodeling a plant or designing a project, my thinking starts with an image of the object. Even the movies in my head start with an object.
“I knew that drawing was not only what I could do, it was what I did best. I took what nature gave me and nurtured the heck out of it.”6
At a rodeo, Temple walked up to the publisher of Arizona Farmer Ranchman and asked him if he’d be interested in an article on designs of various squeeze chutes. She knew that the story would enhance her reputation as an expert in this field. She was delighted when he said, “Yes.”
Several weeks later she received a call from the magazine. They not only wanted to publish the article, they also wanted to take her picture in the stockyards. “It was plain old nerve that got me my first job,” said Temple. “That was in 1972. From then on I wrote regularly for the magazine while finishing my master’s degree.”
Writing for Arizona Farmer Ranchman was a fantastic experience for Temple. “I had repeated opportunities to visit many different places to do stories and interacted with a lot of different people.”7
By the time Temple earned her master’s degree, people had started to listen to her. Her articles in Arizona Farmer Ranchman were widely read and admired. Temple also contributed a chapter to a book on feedlot design.
Many of the workers and managers taunted her as she broke into this formerly all-male world. Temple was an anomaly as a woman in the world of cowboys, construction workers, and slaughterhouse employees. The men decorated Temple’s car with bull testicles. They showed her the blood pit on several occasions. Finally, Temple splattered blood all over the plant manager.
“I didn’t know whether autism or being a woman was the bigger handicap,” said Temple.
“You can’t believe how hard it was for Temple,” said Jim Uhl, president of Agate Construction Company in Scottsdale, Arizona. “I remember one guy said, ‘I won’t have any woman teach me how to do cattle facilities!’”
Temple finished her master’s at Arizona State University in 1975, one of the first farm animal research projects in the world. Her work on cattle behavior and handling is considered pioneering in her field.
After Temple finished school, she visited twenty feed yards in Arizona and then more in Texas. She observed and worked cattle in about thirty feed yards. “One had a really nice curved lead-up chute and another a nice loading ramp, but terrible sorting pens. When I sat down to design, I threw out all the bad parts and kept all the good parts.”
She began her freelance career by designing cattle chutes for Corral Industries, and gradually took on more jobs. “In the 1970s when I was first getting started with my cattle equipment design business, I always carried with me a portfolio of designs and drawings,” she noted.8 She made her first contacts by telephone because it was easier for her than meeting in person. She didn’t have to deal with as many complex social signals. S
he got an opportunity from an outbreak of scabies in Arizona. Scabies, a skin disorder, is caused by mites who lay eggs beneath the animal’s skin, creating a terrible itch. Scabies is extremely contagious. Cattle with lots of mites scratch so hard they lose their hair, get infections, and even lose their lives.
In the 1970s, there was only one way to treat scabies. Each animal had to be plunged up to their ears in a pool of pesticide in a dip vat. The cattle didn’t want to go into a vat that was seven feet deep, which caused a big problem for the owners. One of the managers at Red River Feedyard asked Temple to design a dip vat that cattle wouldn’t fear. Temple understood why they were frightened. “Those cattle must have felt [like] they were forced to jump down an airplane escape slide into the ocean,” she wrote.9
By then Temple had studied, measured, and photographed cattle facilities for six years. Typical of Temple, she spent hours working on a design, carefully including elements she knew the cattle would like and discarding those she knew they wouldn’t.
Temple created a concrete ramp instead of a metal one. She added deep grooves for sure footing. The cattle would enter the water in single file, but they still wouldn’t go underwater. And yet the treatment wouldn’t work if the pesticide didn’t reach their ears.
Temple had to get creative to solve the problem. She angled the ramp steeply in order to create a drop-off. After the cattle plopped quietly into the water, which was over their heads, they bobbed quickly to the surface. “Cattle are good swimmers and effortlessly swam to the other side.”10
The new dip vat was a great innovation; it was highlighted in regional and national farm and ranch magazines. Word spread. Temple’s designs were revolutionary.
