Temple Grandin

by Anita Lesko

  I piped up, “It’s like kids just don’t play outside any more. They’re inside on computers. But it’s up to the parents to limit the time they spend doing that, and get them out doing old-fashioned kid stuff again.”

  “That’s exactly right!” Temple added.

  Temple’s mind drifted back to those early days on the beach, “I loved making sand castles for hours and hours, with my little plastic bucket and tools. I really loved being on the beach. I enjoyed the smell of the salt air, and the sound of the wind blowing.” I said, “I think those of us on the spectrum enjoy all these things more than others, because we see and feel every last detail that others miss. I loved doing all that, too, on the beach in Cape May.”

  Temple got excited sharing this with me, and her tone changed. “One of my happiest times on the beach was finding a bottle with a message in it. I was so excited! I ran all the way home with it, careful not to break it. It was an old chianti bottle, the basket long gone. I carefully opened the cork out of it, opened the message, and was a little disappointed because it only came from about two miles down the road. So, then I started putting messages into bottles and tossing them off boats, which was fun because I’d get people returning them to me.” I was intrigued at Temple’s story, and dug a little deeper. “When you wrote those messages and put them in the bottle, what did you write?” Temple replied, “I’d write, ‘Dear Finder, this bottle was thrown off a boat (there was no GPS back then, so I’d describe where the boat was when I threw it in the water). I’d appreciate for you to write back when you find it, because I’d be interested to learn how far it’s traveled.’ I’d chuck them off the ferry when we were going to Martha’s Vineyard, and I got letters back on about half of them. I always wrote the messages in pencil, so that even if the cork leaked and the note got water damage, the note was still legible.”

  “How often did you do that?” I inquired.

  “I threw off about twenty bottles and got about ten of them back. The one that went the farthest went all the way up to Maine. They wrote back and said they were just looking for shells on the beach and happened to find the bottle with the message, and described where they found it. That was a really fun thing to do!”

  There was one sensory issue that arose each time they went to Martha’s Vineyard, which is typical for a person on the autism spectrum, child or adult. “Something I really hated was on the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard—I hated the horn on that boat. Hated it. They’d blow the horn when they’d get into the harbor.” “Well, how was that dealt with?” I asked. She replied, “So, there was a cabin below the deck. I can remember when I was a kid, flinging myself down on the deck and screaming because it hurt my ears. But then they started letting me ride below the deck, in the cabin. There were windows that I could look out through. You could still hear the horn, but it was much quieter down there in the cabin.”

  She continued, “I hated that ferry because of the horn, but I went on a ferry very similar to that last year and I stood right up on the deck under the wheel house. When they blew the horn I just flinched, that’s all I did. I figured I had to conquer it.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Christmas Memories

  I loved hearing Temple’s tales of her childhood Christmas memories. Being a visual thinker like her, I envisioned the scene she described in my mind, and it was very warm and cozy.

  “Temple, tell me about Christmas time when you were a kid. What do you remember?” Temple perked up on this question, “I loved Christmas time! We had a ritual every Christmas Eve of decorating the Christmas tree, and I really liked that. We would cook steaks in the fireplace, and we knew it wasn’t good for the fireplace, which is why we only did it once a year. But I really loved how the steak tasted from being cooked like that. That was a real treat!” I asked, “Did your family have an artificial tree, or a real one?” Temple replied, “We always got a real tree from somewhere in town where they would sell Christmas trees on the sidewalk, and there were special ornaments that we kept in a special box and used on it each year. There was one ornament that my mother absolutely hated. It was this hideous pink plastic angel that I’d put on the top of the tree. There were also these glass birds with bristle tails and clamps for feet that were very fragile, so we were extremely careful with those, and other special ornaments that mother kept from year to year. My sister and I would each put decorations on the tree, and learn to take turns doing things.” Christmas is my favorite holiday, and I love to play carols throughout the season. “Temple,” I asked, “were there Christmas carols playing while the tree was being decorated?” She reminisced, “Yes, most of the time we had them playing.”

  “What was your favorite Christmas present you ever received?” I asked. “One of my favorite Christmas presents was a Raleigh English-style bicycle,” Temple told me. “I had graduated from the fat-tire kind to the English-style. I really liked that. Now the fat-tire bikes are back in style, but back in the fifties they were not very stylish. That was a really big deal. That was one of my favorite presents, it was the bike to have.”

  “I can imagine how thrilled you were with that bike, after working so hard to learn to ride it!” I stated.

  “Temple, did you believe in Santa Claus?” I asked. “I did believe in Santa Claus, and then my sister went and spoiled it! She snuck downstairs and hid under the piano, and found out who Santa really was. I was about seven when that happened, so I was pretty young. Even before that, I used to wonder. I thought that even if reindeer could fly, there were still problems. How could he get down the chimney? I’d look at the fireplace and analyze that somebody couldn’t fit through it. I was using my logical thinking about Santa Claus!”

  “Oh, that’s really funny. I can picture you trying to analyze all about Santa Claus,” I laughed. I can remember the let-down when I discovered there wasn’t a Santa Claus. How about you?

  CHAPTER 5

  Crazy Funny Stuff & Childhood Memories

  I’m dating myself, but I remember that fun kid’s show The Little Rascals. I loved all the antics those kids got into! It was so much fun watching them. When Temple started sharing stuff that she did as a kid, it reminded me of that show, and I was laughing quite heartily. She was a prankster and fun-loving kid, and it seems like she just went non-stop. There was no sitting around for her! She did a lot of her activities with her sister, who is two years younger than her.

  I suggest you make yourself a cup of coffee or tea, and plan to hang out here with me a while, as I’ve got lots to tell you. This chapter will take you back to your childhood days, and make you remember crazy, funny stuff you did, too. I hope you are sitting in your favorite cozy chair with your mug. I must first tell you that once Temple got on a roll telling me these things, she went one after another!

  Temple started giggling before she even began to talk. “I can remember a really bad thing we did. A wet toilet paper fight over at a friend’s house!” She went on, “In the living room, we had gobs of wet toilet paper and were slinging it onto the walls. This was at my next-door neighbor’s house. When that kid’s mother came home, it wasn’t pretty!”

  “Here’s another thing we did,” she went on, “we threw tomatoes over the garage and they landed in the next-door neighbor’s car, which was a convertible—and they had the top down!” She punctuated this story with more fond laughs. “We didn’t know that car was on the other side of the garage. We were using the tomatoes from the next-door neighbor’s garden, all of them. That car was filled with tomatoes. Boy, was it a mess.”

  I stated, “Wow, Temple, I’m glad I wasn’t your next-door neighbor!”

  “The neighbor was extremely tolerant of our bad behavior,” she said. “Oh, and we had mud fights in her garage, too!” That woman must have been a saint.

  Leave it to Temple to add her own twist on things. She told me, “When I was a very young kid, I had a hockey table. Some of the neighbor’s kids and I liked to put like a hundred marbles on it, and just keep hitting all the marbl
es into the goal. That was a lot more fun than just using the hockey puck! That was one of my favorite games. And the thing is, you’ve got to do that with other people.”

  Are you starting to see just how much Temple was getting out there and simply doing things? She wasn’t sitting around focused on the fact that she had autism—far from it.

  Playing Terminal Chess

  Temple’s next-door neighbor’s house seemed to be a fun place to get into some mischief. Temple once glued a bedroom door shut! She shared, “Fortunately, the kid’s mom came home before the door got glued shut permanently. It wasn’t super glue, as that didn’t exist then. It was epoxy.”

  Temple’s mind was never idle, she was always coming up with something new and creative to do. Temple told me about a chess set that she used the soldering iron on. “That was when we were in elementary school. We played what we called ‘terminal chess.’ When a chess piece would get taken off the board, we’d ‘kill it with the ray gun.’ That meant melting it onto the ping-pong table with a soldering iron!”

  I’m surprised the next-door neighbors didn’t ban Temple from coming over there—I’d suspect they actually got some amusement out of her antics.

  Staging Fake Baths

  “It sounds like you and your sister played a lot together,” I said. “I’m guessing you were always the ringleader.” Temple replied, “One thing my sister and I spent a lot of time doing was staging fake baths! We went through this big elaborate process to pretend that we took a bath, to fool our mother. I was about ten, and my sister was about eight. So, we’d carefully fill the tub up, splash around the water and make a whole lot of noise, then we’d make wet foot prints all over the floor and wet the towels. We’d spend a whole lot of time and effort staging these fake baths. (Temple was now giggling uncontrollably.) I’d crinkle up the towels just right, totally wet the washcloths … we’d spend more time staging the bath than if we had simply just taken one. Of course, that was my idea.” I was shaking my head and rolling my eyes at this point.

  I will tell you that I wasn’t such a creatively naughty kid like Temple was. Do you see what I mean? She’s talking about being a young kid, but was doing things that involved actual planning to carry out. Just wait—it gets better.

  “Temple,” I asked, “were there ever any dances at your school, any social events?” Her reply was, “Oh yes, there were dances. I never got picked to dance. Only if it was ladies’ choice, then I’d pick someone to dance.” “So,” I replied, “what was your motivating factor, what made you pick a certain guy?” She responded, giggling, “I’d pick the one that had been avoiding me.”

  I thought that was a grand answer—very savvy!

  Front Lawn Camping and Drink Stand

  You can guess that Temple was the commanding officer for this venture! “Another fun thing we did was have a sleepout on the front lawn. We used an old army tent from a friend’s garage that we didn’t even know how to put together. We never got any help from an adult, never! We’d pitch the tent that was missing half the pieces, so it sagged. Do you think the adults helped us at all? We had to figure it out on our own. I can remember freezing because my sleeping bag wasn’t heavy enough for that weather. We’d have meetings to plan for all the candy, grape soda, and chips we were going to get! We would all use our allowances, so we learned how to manage money. We were around ten years old; my sister was a little younger, around eight.”

  Temple’s early days as an entrepreneur had to start somewhere! “Then, there was my disastrous drink mix stand. That’s when I learned how much sugar was in these drink mixes. I took a bookcase outside and put a little sign on it, stating it that I was going to have a drink stand. The first pitcher went well, I earned a dollar and change. The next pitcher tasted horrible, because I only had half the amount of sugar. That’s when I learned you need to have all necessary supplies. Well, that’s the basic thing in business, you need to have enough supplies.”

  Oh sure, that’s what every little kid is thinking.

  Superman!

  Temple has a very silly side that you’ll see here. “Once, I went over a neighbor kid’s house, and there were these sticks about three feet long in his yard. He told me they were kryptonite, and if I touched the ends of the sticks, I’d die. I didn’t really believe that, but I didn’t dare touch the ends of the sticks, just in case. It shouldn’t have mattered, though, because I wasn’t Superman! Oh, yeah, Superman was my favorite comic book hero—I was a huge Superman fan. I had the first Superman annual. When we moved, it got thrown out. I bet that thing would be worth a lot today.”

  “I never read my comic books under the covers (like in movies), but I would tell myself stories under the covers then laugh my head off over them.” I inquired, “Temple, what kind of stories would you tell yourself?” She replied, “There were these shows: The Little Rascals: Our Gang. I thought those shows were a real riot, so I would tell myself stories about pranks they’d do at my school and things like that.”

  Fun With Costumes

  Wait until you hear this zany thing Temple did! “Once there was a dog show at school, but my mother didn’t want our dog to spend the day at school. So, I made up a costume of a dog, and I went to school dressed as a dog, and I had other students ‘show’ me. We had a golden retriever back then, his name was Lannie. So my dog costume was white pants, a white tee shirt, and I made the dog head mask out of a bed sheet that I colored up with crayons.”

  I said to Temple, “You sure were into costumes back then!” She replied, “Yes! I’d go watch my mother perform in shows, like the time she was dressed as a mermaid. She had on a bright green shimmering mermaid tail. During that play, my sister and I got to go up on stage and pick numbers out of a hat for the door prizes. We had a costume box at home that had all kinds of old clothes in it, and somewhere along the way I got a derby hat and some 1930s bathing suits. We’d dress up in those as clown suits.”

  Temple was on a roll with all this. “We put a lot of plays on when I was a kid. It would be my sister, maybe one or two kids from next door, and me. We’d make costumes, of course. I made a lot of costumes. I made some really elaborate ones when I was in high school. My roommate and I wanted to be Mr. Ed one year for the school’s Halloween party, so we used surplus grey army flannel to make the costume; we even made a stall in the corner of the room. I had to be the rear end, because my roommate said she would only do it if she could be the head. Another time I was an astronaut, with an elaborate helmet that lit up. I wore that to a horse show that had a costume class. I had to work really hard to make the horse, King, tolerate the spacesuit!”

  This one is a gem. Temple shared, “Another elaborate costume was pretty funny. The school I attended was on a lot of land, and there was a graveyard on it with the original owner’s grave there. That graveyard was right next to the outdoor riding arena. There was big monument there of Jones Warren Wilder. So, I went as Wilder dead in the coffin, and my friend went as the monument. I’d found this pink fluorescent smoking jacket and wore that, as I thought he probably died like that, and I put white powder all over my face to look like a skull.”

  This was one of my favorites. She told me, “There was a mountain lion that had been spotted a few times near the parking lot that we named George, so the following Halloween I dressed as George. I spent a lot of time making costumes while I was in high school, not a lot of time studying. I spent a lot of time cleaning horse stalls, too. The one thing I was doing was learning how to work, something not too many people are doing now.”

  Smiling, I said, “I can count on you to always be thinking logically!”

  Fun at the Elementary School Fair

  Temple sure has a theatrical side. She told me, “My elementary school used to have a fair every year, a really nice fair. Mother would always put on a play during the fair. One year, they put on The Wizard of Oz. I can remember that one of the parents played the witch, and there was a huge green box where the Wizard was. Mother got some pyrotechnic
s to set off from somewhere she worked, and that was pretty impressive. Another time the play was Ferdinand the Bull, and I remember our next-door neighbors found plastic horns to put on their head for cattle horns. It was a very creative, fun thing that was done with all the kids!”

  “There were other fun things, too, like play makeup. We would put on all this makeup and get our picture taken with an instant camera, which was a new thing back then!”

  Temple went on, “We actually had a .22 rifle shooting range at our little fair. All the dads were in on that. They were very careful with us, and we got to shoot the .22’s into the side of a hill with targets. They had a mechanism that would pull the targets in and out, so no one had to go near the target area. After the fair was over, I’d go down with the boys to the target area and dig the bullets out of the wood.”

  Party Crashing and Neighborly Feuds

  Get a load of this; crashing a party takes on a whole new meaning. Temple starts giggling again as she tells me, “One of the funniest things I did was at one of my mother’s parties. I got a hanger and put a dress on it, got a paper bag and made it look like a head, and drew a face on it to put on the hanger. My room was right over the screened-in porch where everyone at the party was. I dropped the hanger down on a string and quickly pulled it right back up. Everyone screamed! I only did that once—only once!”