by Anita Lesko
“So, elaborate more on your thoughts about religion when you look at that Hubble Deep Space Field image,” I prompted. She replied, “I think about the great unanswered questions. Why are we here, what’s out there? I don’t know. Nobody knows. When I was younger, I’d wonder what the meaning of life is. I was just at several autism conferences, where families come up to me and tell me that my advice changed their child’s life. That’s a very positive thing in my life, and I think that gives it a lot of meaning. I did something earlier today when I was sitting at the airport in Milwaukee; a parent came up to talk to me with her very shy daughter. I asked the girl if she had ever done any shopping on her own. She started squirming a little and looking around. I took out a five-dollar bill and handed it to her and said, ‘Go over to that news stand and buy yourself something,’ pointing right across the walkway to the stand. While the girl walked over to buy something, the mother remained by me and admitted that she babies the girl.”
I blurted out, “Oh, I love that idea that you did that! I think it’s really great!” Temple added, “The girl returned and gave me the change. She bought a soda. I just wanted her to experience shopping for something and buying it on her own! This kid was fourteen years old.” I replied, “She will always remember that!”
Just in case you are not up on astronomy, the Hubble Space Telescope is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. Although it is not the first space telescope, Hubble is one of the largest and most versatile, and is well known as both a vital research tool and a public relations boon for astronomy. It is named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble, and is one of NASA’s Great Observatories.
Temple shared, “My trip to the Kennedy Space Center was really emotional for me when I saw a Space X launch. The museum they have there at the visitor’s center was really nice, too. They had an exhibit there about astronauts who have died, and that was done extremely well.”
There is No Single Turning Point
“Temple, what was the most profound thing that happened in your life?” I inquired.
“People are always asking me that, looking for a single turning point. It’s more like a series of doors. I think the first thing would be Mother getting me into the nursery school and speech therapy school. When I talked to her about that, she said they spent a lot of time with us, sitting at a table learning how to take turns. That was a big part of the therapy. There were five or six other little kids, and you had to learn how to wait and take turns along with the speech therapy.”
Dealing with Setbacks
This topic garners a lot of emotion out of Temple. “One of the things that made me cry was getting kicked out of Scottsdale feed yard. The way I dealt with that was to go right down to the Arizona Farmer Ranchman magazine office and ask if I could write a column. I had to replace crying with taking decisive action. My way to retaliate the Scottsdale feed yard was get a press pass so they would have to let me in.”
Continuing, Temple stated, “I’ve had lots of situations that failed, and I picked myself up and dealt with it. There were some times I dealt with it on my own, and sometimes there were people to help me. I can remember when I had a skin cancer that they had to take off my eye lid and it took a really long time to heal, and I got really big nerve attacks with that. It was before I took the antidepressants. There was a really nice lady named Penny Porter that I visited; she also had some bad eye problems, so we could relate on that. I was really nervous about that because I was worried something could go wrong and I’d go blind. I was in my late twenties, and it was a basal cell carcinoma right on the margin of my eyelid. It had to be done while I was awake, with only lidocaine local anesthetic injected all around my eye. It was no fun watching the knife coming right by my eye. I smelled the cauterizing and saw everything. I actually went through the surgery fine, but had trouble with the healing. Of course, I have a tendency towards anxiety attacks, but I remember going to visit Penny Porter at her ranch and she was very supportive. She had some bad glaucoma problems with her eyes. I can remember her saying over and over not to worry, that I was going to get over it. It took about three weeks to a month to finally heal up.”
Temple has had her share of ups and downs on the job, just like everyone else. “I got upset at a job I was working on in the early nineties; there was an awful plant manager. There was a lot of sexism, and I got kicked out of the plant. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I can remember getting really, really upset about that. I knew I didn’t do anything wrong, but it was all about this nerd girl coming into their territory. What made me keep going was this message I remembered that had been written on the wall at Arizona State University: ‘Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.’ I have since learned that Henry Ford wrote that.” This has now become one of my favorite quotes!
Among all her successes, how did Temple deal with failures? “I had a job in 1980 that failed. They wanted to make a conveyer belt that would take pigs up to the third floor, and all it did was flip them over backwards. It was a real mess. What I learned from that was to treat causes of problems, and not just symptoms. Probably if we had changed the pig’s genetics, they would have been able to walk up the ramp just fine. I got really upset at that. It was my first project failure. From that, I learned that engineering cannot fix bad pig genetics. I learned to look at the root cause of a problem.”
“How did you deal with such things?” I asked. “What helped me deal was having more than one project going at a time. If something fails, you know … don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” I then stated that was an idiomatic expression, and asked how she learned them. “You just have to have them explained. Well, each job is like an egg. I went to some seminars when I was first starting my business and they were extremely helpful. One of the things they taught me at a consulting seminar at the American Society of Agricultural Consultants was never to sign a no-compete clause, and make sure you have more than one client. That way, if something fails, you have other projects. Someone at the seminar used the term ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket.’ I asked someone to explain it to me, so they said it meant not to just have one big client, but have many, so that if one drops you, you still have other clients. I can visualize that if you drop the basket, all your eggs will break. I find myself using idioms all the time because I can visualize them. I particularly like the sayings ‘you need to have more than one iron on the fire,’ and ‘strike when the iron is hot.’ I learned these at those seminars. The first thing I did was join the American Society of Agricultural Consultants. In fact, I was the first woman to ever be on their board.” See, Temple made some great business moves, like attending those seminars for advice. Quite the savvy young lady, I must say!
“Tell me about your very first speaking engagement, Temple,” I stated.
“I got invited to do a paper for the American Society of Agricultural Engineers in December of 1974, where I presented some of my cattle-handling work. That was my very first talk. I’ll always remember that. It was at a hotel in Chicago. My presentation was about basic cattle handling: things like distractions, what worked, what didn’t, and shadows. I had really great slides for that, because I had consulted with an engineer who advised me not to just focus on the negative things. Focus on the positive. It really worked.”
As Temple was talking to me about her first presentation, she was in a hotel room that had pillows with duck down, which she’s allergic to. I kept hearing her sniffling, and I thought she was coming down with a cold. Then she told me she was having the room de-feathered! She was sniffling and sneezing throughout the entire conversation. Sneezing again, Temple said, “They took the feathers out, but there’s still feather cooties in here.” I haven’t heard the word “cooties” in quite some time, and I loved it! It needs to become the new buzz word. I asked her how could she be around farm animals but be allergic to feathers. She said it was only duck down that stirred up the allergy. So
, don’t send Temple any duck down pillows as a gift!
The Good Things That Made Temple Cry
We got to talking again about her days in elementary school when her mother, Eustacia, organized plays for the fair each year, and the time The Wizard of Oz was done. Temple wasn’t in that play, but watched it being performed. I asked Temple if she liked to watch the TV movie The Wizard of Oz. “I loved it, absolutely loved it. I always used to cry about the ruby slippers getting her back home. It’s sort of like, and this is something that makes me cry, she had the ruby slippers but she didn’t know she had the power in them. I still get choked up about that.” I heard Temple start to cry, and I was already crying, too. I said, “I understand that. It’s like a person has a gift but they don’t understand how to use it.” Temple sniffed, “That’s right, she just didn’t know how to use them. I can’t even think about it without getting teary.” I muttered, “I know I have a gift, but I haven’t figured out how to use it yet.”
Temple said, “Well, helping kids become successful is one way you can do that. That’s one of the things I get to help people with. Every time I think about Dorothy with her red slippers, it’s like the door is right there but she doesn’t see it. But, with all my career opportunities, I did see the door. I did walk right up to that editor and ask him for his card, just like the movie showed. I did that scene. That goes back to being taught party hostess when I was a little kid, I had to greet each guest then serve snacks. One thing I learned very early is that certain people can open the door. Now the parents are too into the medical model, and they don’t even see the door.” We both continued to cry and talk. It was pretty emotional. Now I can’t wait to see The Wizard of Oz again soon. I’m betting it will look a little different this time around.
There was something back from her childhood days that Temple recalled. “Here’s something that made me really sad. I used to like Howdy Doody. I can remember the back of the boxes of Blue Bonnet margarine when they had these cut-outs of all the Howdy Doody characters, and I wanted to collect them all to get the Howdy Doody stage. Mother said we couldn’t get the stage until we bought enough margarine to get all of the characters. I very carefully got all ten characters. Then I sent my fifty cents in, and about a month or six weeks later I got my fifty cents back and a letter saying, ‘We’re very sorry, but we ran out of stages.’ That was a situation where Mother wanted to teach me that you need to get all your figures first. I remembered that each week we’d get another box of Blue Bonnet margarine, and I’d carefully cut out the figure. When I finally had all ten figures, I sent my fifty cents in. Mother was trying to teach me how to wait, but we waited too long, and they were out of Howdy Doody stages.”
As you can see, Temple has emotions and feelings just like everyone else does. Everyone on the autism spectrum has them. We might not show it like others do, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.
CHAPTER 15
Temple’s Dream Vacation—Total NASA Geek-Out
When I asked Temple what her dream vacation would be (if she actually had time to take one!), I sort of knew what she’d say before she answered. I knew it wasn’t going to be on a cruise to the Bahamas. Can you guess before reading on?
“Okay, Temple,” I started, “so what would be your idea of a dream vacation?”
Temple jumped at this question, “I think it would be really exciting to go to the International Space Station! I’ve been to NASA, and seeing everything there was a lot of fun! I’ve been to quite a few places at NASA: I’ve been to the Jet Propulsion Lab, I’ve been to the Control Room in Houston. When I first entered the Control Room, it was empty. I then learned that as the Space Station goes around, they have blackouts because there are places where they have no communication. That’s when everyone goes to the bathroom. It’s kind of like those places on the highway where you know your phone is going to go out; there’s a certain time of the day when they know the Space Station will have no communication. But then everyone came back in, and they were fully working.”
Temple was quite beside herself! She was on a roll, “They have a Space Station mock-up. One of the astronauts told me that I ask really good questions. We were in a space shuttle mockup and were looking out the window at the cargo bay, and there was a switch, similar to a light switch, that said ‘pyro.’ I noted, ‘That’s not a switch you’d want to touch accidentally,’ and he responded, ‘Yes, you wouldn’t want to touch that, because it would blow the cargo out of the cargo bay!’ I asked why it didn’t have a guard over it. They were interested that I noticed that sort of thing. I did get to put a spacesuit glove on, and it’s like a big clumsy heavy winter glove. Going to the International Space Station (ISS) is my idea of my dream vacation! And going on a spacewalk. I know that’s totally out of the question, but I can fantasize!” I’ll tell you that Temple was really buzzed up talking about this, like a little kid on Christmas morning!
Temple asked me, “Have you ever been to the Chicago airport in the United concourse? They have these tunnels that have neon lights in it. I can remember when they first built it in the early eighties, and I walked through it, thinking to myself, ‘This is about as close I’m going to get to Star Trek.’ I’d walk through that tunnel, imagining that I was on a space station somewhere! I was like, ‘Oh, wow! This is super cool!’” I immediately looked up the United concourse at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Sure enough, there it was. Go check it out. You can then picture Temple strolling along in seventh heaven!
Aside from space, Temple had another vacation spot she’d love to go. “I’d also love to visit an off-shore oil rig! I think that would be really fun. I can remember reading all about how oil rigs operate, and it was claimed that it’s as complicated as going to the moon.”
I’m doubting this one’s on a vacation website.
Oh boy. I knew she was wound up, so I just continued to listen. She went on, “I get thrilled by inventive things people have done. Let me tell you something exciting about the Mars Rover; this makes me happy!” She chuckled. “They had to design the wheels with a marker to signify each time they made a full revolution. They designed it so the marker was Morse code for the Jet Propulsion Lab! I thought that was totally funny.”
Seeing a Real Rocket Launch is More Exciting than a Video
Temple had just returned from a visit to NASA (early October 2017) to give a talk on disability and she called me up to share in her excitement. Now, I’m sharing it with you! Temple gushed, “I got invited down to NASA to give a talk on disability to their employees with disabilities. I did a TED-type talk. I got to go on the coolest tour; I got to see a Space X launch! I can tell you, seeing a real launch is not the same thing as seeing it on television. Right before the launch, a helicopter flew over the area to be sure no one was in the danger zone, and we were right on the edge of the legal zone. We had a pass, and got in as close as anyone was allowed. It was really loud! Very different than on TV. They had a smart phone there so you could listen to the countdown. And let me tell you about the NASA Launch Control Center! They told me that you know the launch is going well when they start to fiddle with the adjustments on their chairs!”
“I got to go into the vehicle assembly building, and on the roof of the vehicle assembly building. That really made me think about the fact that that the astronauts have the right stuff to fly in the rockets, but the geeks make the stuff. (’Make sure you put that in the book,’ she told me, ‘that’s my new saying!’) Then, I got to go on a mobile launch pad that will go on a crawler road for the Mars mission. It had a big banner that said ‘The Future is Here with a trip to Mars’ and an American flag on it. As I walked into it, I got to thinking: an Asperger kid needs to be building this, not playing video games in the basement. When we arrived at that building, we almost parked in Elon Musk’s parking lot at the SpaceX parking lot. There were only about fifty cars there.”
You know who Elon Musk is, right? If you don’t, go look him up. Temple has already read his biog
raphy and keeps up with everything he’s doing. There’s also a great article on him in Rolling Stone! I’ve now become a big Elon Musk fan, too!
Boy, Temple sure livens up when she starts talking about NASA! I could easily picture her commanding a flight to the International Space Station. Temple continued, “When I went to NASA, I met an Astronaut named Rick Linnehan. We talked about the robotic hand, and the spacesuit glove.” Temple had read that the Russian astronaut, the cosmonaut that did an early spacewalk, got into a lot of trouble because they didn’t design the spacesuit right. “It got over-inflated and his hands pulled out of the gloves and his feet pulled out of the boots. I thought, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. That thing should have been tested in a vacuum chamber!’ I was really surprised at that. He had to let some of the air out of the suit so he could move and fit back into the chamber. That’s a really bad visualization mistake.”
Temple’s voice started wavering, as it does when she gets very emotional. “As I stood in front of the vehicle assembly building, I got all choked up thinking about how we did something really special when we did this. We went to the moon, and we did it without sophisticated technology. It blew my mind when I found out that the Gemini and Mercury flights were hand-calculated. I want to read more about the spacesuit and Playtex’s involvement in that, because the bra seamstresses that sewed them never got any credit. You see, a bra company would know how to design something so that the hands and feet wouldn’t pull out—that’s what I was thinking about while I was reading about the Russian cosmonaut. There he was, enjoying his spacewalk, then his spacesuit starts overinflating. He might not fit back into the hatch, and his hands were no longer in the gloves. Thank goodness he didn’t panic, or else he’d have been dead. This is something the visual thinker would have seen; I would have been yelling to test it out in a vacuum chamber. The engineering mind just doesn’t see that. I think this just comes down to different kinds of minds! In his book, Spacesuit, Nicholas de Monchaux wrote about the huge culture clash between the people at Playtex and the engineers. I am almost sure that the visual thinkers at Playtex and the mathematical engineers did not understand each other.”
