by Anita Lesko
“So, what kind of driving can you do now—where are you able to go?” I asked. Temple said, “Now, I can drive everywhere. I hate going to downtown Denver because the roads are designed so poorly. I like to stay in the right-hand lane and go slow. But in Denver, if you stay in the right-hand lane, you get pushed off the exits! You have to do a lot of lane-changing to get into the middle lane to get past the exits. I just don’t like that! I try to time my trips into Denver to avoid the rush hour. When I’m going to the airport, I turn off on a toll road just before the airport to avoid a lot of traffic. I know every inch of the road along the whole route to the airport. Then, I have my special area I park in at the Denver International Airport parking lot. There’s typically a lot of empty spaces in this particular area.”
“Wow!” I started, “I know you have to go to the airport multiple times each week. That’s a lot.”
Temple reiterated her advice for learning to drive, “When it comes to driving, I highly recommend practicing in a totally safe place, like an empty parking lot, quiet roads, or an open field. You’ve got to totally learn how to operate that vehicle before you can go where there’s any traffic! It has to become a motor function before you can safely drive out on busy roads.”
“I totally agree. Absolutely,” I added.
Laughing, Temple shared, “I had to learn on a horrible clutch! So, Ann did something really clever. One day, when we were going to the mailbox, she said to slide over and just steer. So, for five or six trips to the mailbox all I did was steer, and she handled the horrible clutch. Then she got me down at the base of the driveway where there was nothing to hit. Boy, that truck lurched and jumped at first!”
“Of course,” she went on, “I never text while I’m driving, or do anything that’s distracting. Just focus on the driving!”
Listen to Temple, everyone! We need to make baseball caps and T-shirts that say, “What Would Temple Do?”
Here’s more from Temple. “I stress the importance of learning how to drive. It enabled me to have my career! If I didn’t drive, I would never have been able to achieve success in my career. I wouldn’t have been able to go to all the feed yards and processing plants. You just have to do it. I highly suggest getting the learner’s permit, and learning to drive slowly. Do a little more each week, and gradually build up the skills. Driving is something you don’t jump into the deep end with. It must be a slow process. I think we must get more proactive on finishing the transition before they graduate from high school. Shopping. Bills. Laundry. Driving. A job.”
The individual with autism and their family need to understand that it’s going to take a lot of time to fully learn to handle the vehicle and feel comfortable to drive. Patience is necessary. Be happy with every small step, they eventually add up to giant steps.
While out on the roads driving, everyone experiences something that gets their heart pounding, and perhaps a few colorful words blurted out! Temple is just like everyone else. She shared this scary experience with me when I asked, “Temple, has there ever been anything scary that happened while you were driving?” She replied, “Once while driving, a board came flying across the road—that was scary as hell. I was in the right-hand lane on the freeway, minding my own business, and a car passed me with a little low trailer on the back that had no tailgate. There were three two-by-sixes on it. Then he passes me, and just as he does, the board slides off. I remember locking onto it like a fighter jet radar and my visual took over. This board was floating on a diagonal angle right toward me. I followed that board and eased over to my right into the breakdown lane, and I did a perfect job of straddling it. The second I straddled that board, my heart started pounding and every swear word I could think of came out of me to describe the trailer, the board, and the driver! It took me about twenty minutes to calm down.”
Don’t you just love it, swear words and all?
CHAPTER 13
Work Hard to Succeed
Something that came up multiple times throughout our conversations was regarding the fact that she comes from a wealthy family. She’d see it in print, or people would say it throughout her whole life. She said she’s seen it online that people have bashed her about coming from a wealthy family. It truly hurts her feelings. While it was true that Temple’s family had money, that isn’t the reason she is where she is today. What got her to this point is her extreme intelligence, perseverance, and endless hard work. One day while talking, Temple was very happy to learn that I came from a very poor family. She then started saying, “You are proof that it can be done having come from a poor family! I want you to include something in this book telling people about all the jobs you did when you were young. All of that built the skills necessary for success as an adult. You are proof that a person with autism who came from a poor family can be successful! I think this is really exciting, and people need to see this.” Temple asked how I afforded to attend college. I told her I had to take out over one hundred thousand dollars in student loans, which took me over ten years to pay off. Temple’s response was, “This needs to be in the book, people need to see this. All those childhood jobs enabled you to have a successful career as an adult. It was a lot of hard work, but you did it. It was all early exposure!” At the end of this book, I have included a bit of what Temple asked me to share with you. It’s in the afterword.
“Temple, what was your biggest motivating factor to work as hard as you did?” I asked. She continued, “When I was in my twenties, my motivating factor was to prove I wasn’t dumb. There were a lot of people who didn’t think I was going to amount to anything. So when I designed those dip vats and I did the drawings for the Red River project, when I completed the drawings and I looked at them, I couldn’t believe I had done them. I didn’t think I had it in me to do it. Proving that I could do it was a big thing. Yes, I had the love of the cattle, but I had a really big motivation that I could really do something! I did not do that dip vat because I had to survive. I did it because I wanted to. That’s what made me design all my cattle facilities—because I wanted to do them. I wanted to prove that I could do it. It also allowed me to use my mind to solve problems.”
Temple has very artistic talents, which later in life enabled her to draw her elaborate designs for the cattle facilities. In boarding school, she started demonstrating these talents by painting signs. She explains, “In the sixties and seventies, signs were hand-painted on plywood. My first sign was for a beauty shop. I hand painted the name of it on the sign, it was ‘Virginia’s Beauty Shop.’ I was about seventeen, so I made these signs in my room at the boarding school. I had made friends with one of the carpenters working on the building, and it was his wife who owned the beauty shop. He asked me to paint it and handed me a ten-dollar bill!” Temple loves talking about the sign painting gig! Don’t you just love the photo of her by the white truck?
Photo courtesy of Temple Grandin
“Where did you get that white truck?” I asked. “I had a white Ford Ranger that I used for my sign painting business. This was one time it certainly helped coming from a wealthy family. I had walked into the car dealership and went into the truck area, and they didn’t even want to pay attention to me. So, I went over to the car area, and said I wanted to buy a pickup. Nobody would hardly even look at me. I then asked how much it was, and I wrote out a check for it. They about dropped their teeth! So, in that situation I was lucky to come from a wealthy family and be able to do that. I know that they thought I was just so weird that I could possibly be interested in buying a truck. When I bought it, the car salesman got the commission, because the truck salesman didn’t give me the time of day. They couldn’t believe when I pulled out the check and wrote it out for the entire cost.” Sadly, those on the spectrum have probably all experienced something like that out in public, getting ignored like that. I would have loved to hear what went on at that dealership after she left.
Temple continued, “You get better and better by getting out there and doing things, adding data to
your data base. When you sit there all day playing video games, you’re not adding anything to your data base! I also think I learned to be brazen by helping out at my mother’s dinner parties, because I had to go up to each person and greet them, take their coats, and all that. I had a sewing job when I was thirteen, then I’d take people out on trail rides at my aunt’s ranch. I’d wait on tables, and did internships in college. I had my sign painting business. That’s where I first started to learn to work. Like you, when you wanted to do something, you went and did it. That’s the ‘can do’ attitude. People don’t have that today.”
I asked Temple for more details on her summer internships. They would have been great for any college student, but they were even better for a person with autism; it got her interacting with people and working. Here’s what Temple told me. “I worked in a research lab one summer where they did pharmaceutical experiments on mice, and I had to run the experiments. They wanted to see how alcohol interacted with antidepressants. So, I’d inject mice with some alcohol and antidepressants, put them on their backs, and see how long it took them to wake up and right themselves. It was like a regular job, in that I had to be there from eight in the morning to five in the evening every day. Then, there was another internship at a hospital that Mother set up. They had kids with autism there, and I was assigned to be a one-on-one aid to a little girl who was nonverbal. She was terrified of elevators. They had rickety old wooden elevators, and she was afraid the doors had wooden arms that would catch her. It was ancient, like a 1930s elevator. My job was just to stay with the little girl the whole time. When the other kids did a group game, I’d be involved in that, too.”
“Where did you live while you were doing the internship?” I inquired. “I was supposed to live in a house they had on the grounds, but that went under construction, so at the last minute I had to find a room to rent. I talked to the other staff members, and they found a room I could rent in a house. So, I was doing a lot of stuff on my own. This was in the sixties.”
Temple continued, “See, when I did the other internship at the research lab, I rented a house with another woman. Somebody at the college had set that up, as they had a friend who knew the woman. So, I ended up renting a room at her house and paying her rent.” Curious, I asked, “How did you contend with a strange person?” Temple replied, “I was renting a house with a new person, and driving to all my jobs—very independent things. I got to do some other fun things while I was there. Someone had a motorcycle and I figured out how to make a burglar alarm for it. If somebody moved the motorcycle, the horn would go off. It was really simple, a mercury switch, so when you tilt it, it goes off. I was so happy when I made that work,” she laughed.
Temple can always find some new adventure. “Another fun thing I got to do there, was the only time I ever got to wear a scuba outfit and go in the pool. I swam around in the pool with the scuba outfit on, and the sensation of breathing underwater was really weird.”
“Were you getting paid at those jobs?” I asked. Temple replied, “Both those internships were unpaid. Mother set that up through her contacts. That was at a hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. The research lab was at the Worchester Foundation for Experimental Biology. That was set up by a woman on campus who knew someone there. Mother got me doing those really independent things. The third summer she only let me stay at my aunt’s ranch for four weeks, then I went to do those internships. The first two summers I spent the entire time at my aunt’s ranch. Mother wanted me to experience more, learn new things, and interact with other people.”
“Well, how did you feel about going somewhere new like that?” I asked.
“You see, my mother wanted me to do something else. She said to me, ‘We need you to try to learn some other things.’ So, I only did the ranch for half the summer. She didn’t just take the ranch away. There were two and a half months of summer, so I did four weeks at the ranch and the rest at the internships. I was interested in going for the challenge of it, and I did it. It forced me to do a lot of things independently.”
I commented, “It’s a pretty big deal for a kid with autism to have done all that, to go and be with total strangers and have to get along. What did you do while you were renting the room at the lady’s house? Did you interact much with her?”
“Oh yeah, we did,” she told me. “We went to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang together. Afterward, she wanted to have liver for dinner, and I wanted to make sure it was cooked enough to not get trichomonas from it.” She paused here to laugh at the memory. “So we went out and got the liver, then got a cookbook and looked it up to be sure we cooked it enough!” Temple was laughing heartedly reminiscing that escapade. Temple wasn’t much on parties, but I’m not surprised she went to this one: “One weekend, the foundation had a scientist party, and I went to that.” See what I mean? She knew there’d be a room full of scientists. It probably reminded her of back in the day, sitting with her grandfather on Sunday afternoons.
As you can see, Temple was always out there doing something. And that’s why she is where she is today. A person simply cannot stay home on their computer, not working, not interacting with others, not learning how to live. There’s no getting around it. One has to start at a young age. Like Temple said earlier, she wants to get away from the “transition to work.” If it’s been being done all along, there wouldn’t be a transition, simply a progression.
CHAPTER 14
Things That Make Temple Cry
The general public is under the misconception that individuals with autism don’t have any feelings or emotions because there’s typically a lack of facial expressions. Remember in the introduction, when I talked about the saying “still water runs deep?” Well, that really applies to those of us on the autism spectrum. Temple experiences sadness, too, and I’ll share those things here.
Temple talked about crying, and I asked, “Did you have anyone who you’d call when you were upset?” She replied, “When I’d get upset, I’d go cry somewhere. I had people that’d I’d call for emotional support, yes. I’d call Ann at the ranch. I’d talk to Jim the contractor about things. There were people like Jim that were good to me.”
The summer Temple spent at her aunt’s ranch changed her life forever. Of course, Temple developed a special kinship with Ann during that time. I could sense it was painful for Temple to answer these questions, but I felt I needed to ask them. “Temple, I need to ask you these questions. How did you feel when you lost people who were important to you?” Temple replied, “I can remember when my aunt Ann died. That was extremely sad. That happened in the late eighties. I went and visited her, and she was almost like a skeleton. I can remember walking around in this shopping center like a zombie, I just couldn’t believe it. I went back and saw her one more time, and then I left. She looked absolutely awful. I can’t remember what she died of, but I remember she was all shriveled up and weak. That was extremely sad.”
I then asked, “When your Aunt finally did die, how did you cope with that?” Temple’s voice changed when she answered this question. “Well, what was really awful was seeing her right on death’s doorstep. That was worse than finding out that she died.”
I remembered her talking about her relationship with Oliver Sacks, so I asked, “What about when Oliver Sacks died?” Temple went on, “I can remember reading in the New York Times about Oliver Sack’s life on the computer in my kitchen, and crying so hard I couldn’t work the computer. I used to go over Oliver’s home every year, a few days before or a few days after Christmas.” When I talked to Temple’s friend Rosalie Winard, she told me that she also went with Temple to visit Oliver. She took lots of photos of Temple at their gatherings. Temple went on, “Oliver always talked about which way he could have gone in life. There was an editorial he wrote before he died, it was in the New York Times, but I was so upset that I couldn’t work the computer right. When I’d go to visit, we’d usually go out to dinner and then to his place for a bit and we’d talk. The editorial that he wro
te was about the meaning of life, and it was right before he died. He knew he was going to die. He talked about the different ways his life could have gone.” Curious to hear it, I asked, “What were the ways it could have gone?” Temple stated, “Well, he could have gone into a very religious way of life, and the other way was writing. You know, circumstances determine where you go. Yeah, that was extremely sad. Then I wrote something about him for a documentary.”
Temple called me with one last thing to add in this chapter. She started, “When I get asked about religion, I think of my Hubble Deep Space Field picture, which I’ve had for the last fifteen years or so. It just shows hundreds of galaxies; not stars, galaxies! I look at that, and that’s what makes me think about religion. You know, there’s a big universe out there.” I could hear Temple’s voice get a bit shaky. She continued, “The little badge they made for me at Cape Kennedy, I hung that on the deep space field poster. That’s where it belongs. I get to thinking about the time I stood in front of the vehicle assembly building at NASA, and ask myself why we do something like go to the moon. It’s a search for knowledge.” I added, “Well, when I look at photos from the Hubble, I start pondering where it begins, where it ends, and how it all started.” Temple replied, “We don’t know. We just don’t know. That’s why they use the Hubble to seek answers.”
