Autism’s First Child at 77

[Guest guest]

Autism’s First Child

By Donvan and Caren Zucker

As new cases of autism have exploded in recent years—some form of the condition

affects about one in 110 children today—efforts have multiplied to understand

and accommodate the condition in childhood. But children with autism will become

adults with autism, some 500,000 of them in this decade alone. What then? Meet

Gray Triplett, 77, of Forest, Mississippi. He was the first person ever

diagnosed with autism. And his long, happy, surprising life may hold some

answers.

In 1951, a Hungarian-born psychologist, mind reader, and hypnotist named Franz

Polgar was booked for a single night’s performance in a town called Forest,

Mississippi, at the time a community of some 3,000 people and no hotel

accommodations. Perhaps because of his social position—he went by Dr. Polgar,

had appeared in Life magazine, and claimed (falsely) to have been Sigmund

Freud’s “medical hypnotist”—Polgar was lodged at the home of one of Forest’s

wealthiest and best-educated couples, who treated the esteemed mentalist as

their personal guest.

Polgar’s all-knowing, all-seeing act had been mesmerizing audiences in American

towns large and small for several years. But that night it was his turn to be

dazzled, when he met the couple’s older son, , who was then 18. Oddly

distant, uninterested in conversation, and awkward in his movements,

nevertheless possessed a few advanced faculties of his own, including a flawless

ability to name musical notes as they were played on a piano and a genius for

multiplying numbers in his head. Polgar tossed out “87 times 23,” and ,

with his eyes closed and not a hint of hesitation, correctly answered “2,001.”

Indeed, was something of a local legend. Even people in neighboring towns

had heard of the Forest teenager who’d calculated the number of bricks in the

facade of the high school—the very building in which Polgar would be

performing—merely by glancing at it.

Video: The authors reveal how they tracked down and discuss the

significance of his long, happy life.

According to family lore, Polgar put on his show and then, after taking his

final bows, approached his hosts with a proposal: that they let him bring

with him on the road, as part of his act.

’s parents were taken aback. “My mother,” recalls ’s brother,

Oliver, “was not at all interested.” For one, things were finally going well for

, after a difficult start in life. “She explained to [Polgar] that he was

in school, he had to keep going to classes,” Oliver says. He couldn’t simply

drop everything for a run at show business, especially not when he had college

in his sights.

But there was also, whether they spoke this aloud to their guest or not, the

sheer indignity of what Polgar was proposing. ’s being odd, his parents

could not undo; his being made an oddity of, they could, and would, prevent. The

offer was politely but firmly declined.

What the all-knowing mentalist didn’t know, however, was that , the boy

who missed the chance to share his limelight, already owned a place in history.

His unusual gifts and deficits had been noted outside Mississippi, and an

account of them had been published—one that was destined to be translated and

reprinted all over the world, making his name far better-known, in time, than

Polgar’s.

His first name, anyway.

was the first child ever diagnosed with autism. Identified in the annals

of autism as “Case 1 … T,” he is the initial subject described in a 1943

medical article that announced the discovery of a condition unlike “anything

reported so far,” the complex neurological ailment now most often called an

autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. At the time, the condition was considered

exceedingly rare, limited to and 10 other children—Cases 2 through

11—also cited in that first article.

That was 67 years ago. Today, physicians, parents, and politicians regularly

speak of an “epidemic” of autism. The rate of ASDs, which come in a range of

forms and widely varying degrees of severity—hence spectrum—has been

accelerating dramatically since the early 1990s, and some form of ASD is now

estimated to affect one in every 110 American children. And nobody knows why.

There have always been theories about the cause of autism—many theories. In the

earliest days, it was an article of faith among psychiatrists that autism was

brought on by bad mothers, whose chilly behavior toward their children led the

youngsters to withdraw into a safe but private world. In time, autism was

recognized to have a biological basis. But this understanding, rather than

producing clarity, instead unleashed a contentious debate about the exact

mechanisms at work. Differing factions argue that the gluten in food causes

autism; that the mercury used as a preservative in some vaccines can trigger

autistic symptoms; and that the particular measles-mumps-rubella vaccine is to

blame. Other schools of thought have portrayed autism as essentially an

autoimmune response, or the result of a nutritional deficiency. The mainstream

consensus today—that autism is a neurological condition probably resulting from

one or more genetic abnormalities in combination with an environmental

trigger—offers little more in the way of explanation: the number of genes and

triggers that could be involved is so large that a definitive cause, much less a

cure, is unlikely to be determined anytime soon. Even the notion that autism

cases are on the rise is disputed to a degree, with some believing that the

escalating diagnoses largely result from a greater awareness of what autism

looks like.

There is no longer much dispute, however, about the broad outlines of what

constitutes a case of autism. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

Disorders—the so-called bible of psychiatry—draws a clear map of symptoms. And

to a remarkable degree, these symptoms still align with those of one “ T,”

who was first examined at s Hopkins University, in Baltimore, in the 1930s,

the same boy who would later amaze a mentalist and become renowned for counting

bricks.

In subsequent years, the scientific literature updated T’s story a few

times, a journal entry here or there, but about four decades ago, that narrative

petered out. The later chapters in his life remained unwritten, leaving us with

no detailed answer to the question Whatever happened to ?

There is an answer. Some of it we turned up in documents long overlooked in the

archives of s Hopkins. But most of it we found by tracking down and spending

time with himself. His full name is Gray Triplett. He’s 77 years

old. And he’s still in Forest, Mississippi. Playing golf.

The question that haunts every parent of a child with autism is What will happen

when I die? This reflects a chronological inevitability: children with autism

will grow up to become adults with autism, in most cases ultimately outliving

the parents who provided their primary support.

Then what?

It’s a question that has yet to grab society’s attention, as the discussion of

autism to date has skewed, understandably, toward its impact on childhood. But

the stark fact is that an epidemic among children today means an epidemic among

adults tomorrow. The statistics are dramatic: within a decade or so, more than

500,000 children diagnosed with autism will enter adulthood. Some of them will

have the less severe variants—Asperger’s syndrome or HFA, which stands for

“high-functioning autism”—and may be able to live more independent and

fulfilling lives. But even that subgroup will require some support, and the

needs of those with lower-functioning varieties of autism will be profound and

constant.

How we respond to those needs will be shaped in great measure by how we choose

to view adults with autism. We can dissociate from them, regarding them as

tragically broken persons, and hope we are humane enough to shoulder the burden

of meeting their basic needs. This is the view that sees the disabled in general

as wards of the community, morally and perhaps legally, and that, in the

relatively recent past, often “solved” the “problem” of these disabled adults by

warehousing them for life—literally in wards.

Alternatively, we can dispense with the layers of sorrow, and interpret autism

as but one more wrinkle in the fabric of humanity. Practically speaking, this

does not mean pretending that adults with autism do not need help. But it does

mean replacing pity toward them with ambition for them. The key to this view is

a recognition that “they” are part of “us,” so that those who don’t have autism

are actively rooting for those who do.

Triplett, the first person cast in the story of autism, has spent time in

the worlds shaped by each of these views.

drives his car with a light, percussive rhythm. After pressing on the gas

pedal for a second, he lets up briefly, and then presses back down again. Down.

Release. Down. Release. The tempo doesn’t vary. It’s late afternoon, and

is guiding his coffee-colored 2000 Cadillac, in hardly perceptible surges and

glides, south along Mississippi’s Route 80. Though his forward posture and

two-fisted grip on the wheel are those of an old man, his face beams like a

boy’s. He wears the expression, at once relaxed and resolute, of a man who is

doing precisely what he wants to be doing.

The day’s agenda thus far has included morning coffee with friends, a long walk

for exercise, a Bonanza rerun on TV, and now, at 4:30, this short drive down

Route 80 to get in some golf. “I noticed,” he mentions, “you have a Lafayette

County sticker on your car.” He’s broken a long silence with that comment, a

reference to the registration decal on the rental we parked in his driveway. His

words hang there for a moment, and then he adds: “That means it comes from

Lafayette County.” That’s all. Nodding to himself, goes silent again, his

focus returning to the road ahead, or tuned to some inner monologue. Given his

tendency to close his eyes for long moments when he speaks, this is probably the

safest choice.

He parks just short of the front steps of the Forest Country Club, an

establishment without pretensions. The one-story red-brick clubhouse fronts onto

a well-tended, mostly flat course carved out of the woods. Membership is $100

per family per month, and a round of 18 holes costs $20 on a weekday. On any

given day, the roster of players on the fairways includes lawyers and mechanics,

bankers and truckers, salesmen and farmers—and . Actually, is there

every day, weather permitting. And almost every day, he golfs alone.

Not everyone who plays here realizes that “DT”—as he’s known around the club—has

autism. But his quirks are hard to miss as he makes his way to the first tee,

well within sight of members who take the shade in armchairs under the club’s

columned portico. A small man in khaki shorts and a green knit shirt, with a

pink-camouflage bucket hat pulled down tight over his ears, strides to

the tee with the distinctive gait that is often a tip-off for autism—his arms

out from his sides in the shape of a large capital A, his steps just slightly

mechanical, his head and shoulders bobbing left-right-left in the rocking

movement of a metronome.

The fact is that ’s not a bad golfer: tee shots mostly on the fairway,

passable short game, can nail a six-foot putt. His swing, however, is an

unfolding pantomime, a ritual of gestures he seems compelled to repeat with

almost every shot—especially when he really wants the ball to travel.

He licks the fingers of his right hand, and then his left. Squaring himself to

the ball, he raises his club skyward, until it’s straight up over his head, as

if he were hoisting a banner. Sometimes he holds his arms up there for a long

moment. Then he brings the club head back to earth, stopping not far from the

ball, before taking it back up. He goes through a series of these backswings,

picking up speed with each iteration until, stiff-legged, he inches forward to

get his head over the ball. With one final stroke, he commits to contact. Crack!

It’s gone, and , bouncing up and down at the knees, peers down the fairway

to see the result. As a swing, it’s the opposite of fluid. But it’s ’s

own. And he never whiffs it.

Some days, has no choice but to partner with other golfers, when the

country club, honoring golf’s traditions as a social game, reserves the entire

course for a membership “scramble.” In a scramble, golfers are randomly assigned

to teams, which compete for lowest group score by picking the ball in the best

position and having everyone on the team play from that spot. During one recent

scramble, made the rounds with Lori and Elk and and , all of

whom seemed to be at least three or four decades younger than he was. But

held his own competitively, with his shots often enough the ones used. He also

kicked in a passable amount of friendly banter, which was returned in the same

spirit, though ’s patter tended to get repetitive: “Way to hit that ball,

!” “Way to hit that ball, Lori!” “Way to hit that ball, Elk!” At times he

would entertain variations, marrying his partners’ names with words from his own

private vocabulary: “Hey, Elkins the Elk!” “Hey, Cherry!” “Okay, thank you,

the Senneth!”

Most of the time, however, remained silent. This is in keeping with the

decorum of the game, of course. But appears comfortable with silence, and

in a larger sense, content with the life he’s leading, which resembles—with the

car and the coffee and the golf and the TV—a retirement community’s brochure

version of how to live out the golden years. has freedom, independence,

and good health. All in all, life has turned out well for autism’s first child.

was institutionalized when he was only 3 years old. Records in the

archives at s Hopkins quote the family doctor in Mississippi suggesting that

the Tripletts had “overstimulated the child.” ’s refusal as a toddler to

feed himself, combined with other problem behaviors his parents could not

handle, prompted the doctor’s recommendation for “a change of environment.” In

August 1937, entered a state-run facility 50 miles from his home, in a

town then actually called Sanatorium, Mississippi.

The large building where he was housed served what today seems an odd function:

preemptive isolation for children thought to be at risk of catching

tuberculosis. The place wasn’t designed or operated with a child like in

mind, and according to a medical evaluator, his response upon arrival was

dramatic: he “faded away physically.”

At the time, institutionalization was the default option for severe mental

illness, which even his mother believed was at the root of ’s behavior:

she described him in one despairing letter as her “hopelessly insane child.”

Being in an institution, however, didn’t help. “It seems,” his s Hopkins

evaluator later wrote, “he had there his worst phase.” With parental visits

limited to twice a month, his predisposition to avoid contact with people

broadened to everything else—toys, food, music, movement—to the point where

daily he “sat motionless, paying no attention to anything.”

He had not been diagnosed correctly, of course, because the correct diagnosis

did not yet exist. Very likely he was not alone in that sense, and there were

other children with autism, in other wards in other states, similarly

misdiagnosed—perhaps as “feeble-minded,” in the medical parlance of the day, or

more likely, because of the strong but isolated intelligence skills many could

demonstrate, as having schizophrenia.

’s parents came for him in August of 1938. By then, at the end of a year

of institutionalization, was eating again, and his health had returned.

Though he now “played among the other children,” his observers noted, he did so

“without taking part in their occupations.” The facility’s director nonetheless

told ’s parents that the boy was “getting along nicely,” and tried to talk

them out of removing their son. He actually requested that they “let him alone.”

But they held their ground, and took home with them. Later, when they

asked the director to provide them with a written assessment of ’s time

there, he could scarcely be bothered. His remarks on ’s full year under

his care covered less than half a page. The boy’s problem, he concluded, was

probably “some glandular disease.”

, about to turn 5 years old, was back where he had started.

Dr. Gerhardt waves a credit card in his right hand, animated—as he often

is—about the point he’s trying to make. This time, it’s a trick that he

guarantees makes it impossible to swipe the card the wrong way. “You can slide

it this way, or like this, or stick it in like this”—he jabs straight into the

air in front of him, as if into a bank machine—“and if you keep your thumb in

this position on the card, you will always swipe it the correct way.”

Closer examination clarifies: the card he is holding is a Visa, and his right

thumb completely covers the blue-on-white logo in the lower right corner, the

sweet spot that makes the trick work. Keep your thumb there, Gerhardt

pronounces, and the magnetic stripe will always line up properly, regardless of

the type of card reader.

Gerhardt’s demonstration isn’t intended merely for news-you-can-use convenience.

Rather, he’s explaining how using a bank card fits into the bigger picture that

has defined his career since he embarked on his doctorate in educational

psychology at Rutgers in the early 1980s: the struggle people with autism face

to be accepted into a world occupied by “the rest of us.”

The truth is that we often deny to adults with autism the kind of empathy and

support we make readily available to children with the condition—or, for that

matter, to people with white canes at crosswalks. We underestimate their

capabilities, reveal our discomfort in their company, and display impatience

when they inconvenience us. The people standing in the back of a long

supermarket checkout line aren’t always going to say or do the nice thing when

some odd-looking man in front is holding the whole place up because he can’t

figure out the credit-card swipe. It’s in that moment, Gerhardt says, that the

thumb-on-the-logo trick is a matter of “social survival.” If the man with autism

can navigate this situation successfully—and, just as important, be seen doing

so—Gerhardt argues that our collective acceptance of people with autism in “our”

spaces will tick up a notch. If the man fails, it will go the other way.

Gerhardt, who is a former president of the Virginia-based Organization for

Autism Research and is now developing a program focused on adolescence to

adulthood at the respected McCarton School in New York, is considered among the

top experts in the country working with adults who have autism. But he jokes

that this is chiefly because he’s never faced much competition. “I have an

entire career,” he says, “based on people not wanting my job.” Child development

is the hot area in autism research; working with adults, Gerhardt says, “is not

a career move.” Adults present greater challenges: they are big enough to do

real violence in the event of a tantrum; they are fully capable of sexual

desires, and all that those imply; and they’re bored by many of the activities

that can distract and entertain children with autism. “People want to treat

these adults like little kids in big bodies,” Gerhardt says. “They can’t.

They’re adults.” As such, he argues, they’re equipped, as much as any of us,

with the recognizable adult aspiration of wanting to “experience life.”

“It’s having friends,” Gerhardt explains. “It’s having interesting work. It’s

having something you want. It’s all the things the rest of us value, once given

an opportunity.”

Gerhardt wants priority given to teaching the kinds of skills adults with autism

need in order to survive independently: keeping track of money, asking for

directions and then following them, wearing clean clothes, navigating public

transport, recognizing a dangerous person, and—of extreme difficulty for

most—looking a job interviewer in the eye. Gerhardt disputes the doubts he hears

even within his profession about encouraging adults with autism to aspire to

independence. “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” he asks. “You know—he’s

at the supermarket and he drops some eggs, or somebody thinks he’s a little

weird. I would rather he be there alone, and only getting nine out of 10 items

he came shopping for, than need me there with him to get all 10. That’s a much

better way to live.”

This leads to the question of where they will live. As it is, 85 percent of

adults with autism still live with parents, siblings, or other relatives. But

what happens when that is no longer an option? Large-scale warehousing is

gone—and good riddance, most say. An obvious alternative is residential

arrangements offering multiple spaces to people with autism, who can share

support services under one roof in a setting that really is a home. At present,

however, given both start-up costs and resistance from neighbors, the number of

spaces in such homes is limited, and landing a spot can be extremely difficult:

nationally, more than 88,000 adults are already on waiting lists.

All of which leads to an unsettling answer for those parents asking what

happens, after they die, to their children with autism. We don’t really know.

BROTHERS: A recent family snapshot of with Oliver (right)

Most likely, ’s name would never have entered the medical literature had

his parents not had both the ambition to seek out the best help for him, and the

resources to pay for it. Triplett had been born into the McCravey family,

financiers who had founded and still controlled the Bank of Forest. Uncommonly

for a woman at that time, particularly in that milieu, she had a college degree.

After a doomed romance with a local cotton farmer’s son, whom her family forbade

her to marry—he later went on to renown as six-term segregationist U.S. Senator

“Big Jim” Eastland—she instead married the former mayor’s son, an attorney

named Oliver Triplett Jr. With a degree from Yale Law School and a private

practice located directly opposite the county courthouse, Oliver would later

hold the position of Forest town attorney and would be admitted to the bar of

the Supreme Court of the United States. He was an intense man who had suffered

two nervous breakdowns, and who could get so lost in his thoughts that he’d

return from walks in town with no recollection of having seen anyone or anything

along the way. But as a lawyer, he was considered brilliant, and when he

proposed to , her family apparently raised no objections.

Their first son, , was born in September 1933. A brother came along nearly

five years later, while was in Sanatorium. Also named Oliver, the baby

stayed behind with his grandparents in Forest when, in October 1938, the rest of

the family boarded a Pullman car in Meridian, Mississippi, headed for Baltimore.

’s parents had secured him a consultation with the nation’s top child

psychiatrist at the time, a s Hopkins professor named Dr. Leo Kanner.

Kanner (pronounced “Connor”) had written the book, literally, on child

psychiatry. Aptly titled Child Psychiatry, this definitive 1935 work immediately

became the standard medical-school text, and was reprinted through 1972. No

doubt Kanner’s stature was enhanced by his pedigree—he was an Austrian Jew with

a medical degree from the University of Berlin—while his nearly impenetrable

accent perfectly fit the image Americans had in mind when they used the word

psychiatrist.

Kanner would always seem slightly perplexed by the intensity of the letter he

had received from ’s father in advance of their meeting. Before departing

Mississippi, Oliver had retreated to his law office and dictated a detailed

medical and psychological history covering the first five years of his elder

son’s life. Typed up by his secretary and sent ahead to Kanner, it came to 33

pages. Many times over the years, Kanner would refer to the letter’s “obsessive

detail.”

Excerpts from Oliver’s letter—the outpourings of a layman, but also a parent—now

hold a unique place in the canon of autism studies. Cited for decades and

translated into several languages, Oliver’s observations were the first detailed

listing of symptoms that are now instantly recognizable to anyone who knows

autism. It is not too much to say that the agreed-upon diagnosis of autism—the

one being applied today to define an epidemic—was modeled, at least in part, on

’s symptoms as described by his father.

Their little boy, Oliver wrote, had almost never cried to be with his mother. He

appeared to have withdrawn “into his shell,” to “live within himself,” to be

“perfectly oblivious to everything about him.” Entirely uninterested in human

beings—including his parents, for whom he displayed “no apparent affection”—he

nevertheless had several obsessions, including “a mania for spinning blocks and

pans and other round objects.” He was fascinated with numbers, musical notes,

pictures of U.S. presidents, and the letters of the alphabet, which he enjoyed

reciting in reverse order.

Physically awkward, he also had intense dislikes: milk, swings,

tricycles—“almost a horror of them”—and any change in routine or interruption of

his internal thought processes: “When interfered with he has temper tantrums,

during which he is destructive.” Generally nonresponsive when his name was

called—he seemed not to have heard—he instead had “to be picked up and carried

or led wherever he ought to go.” When asked a question, if he answered at all,

he generally kept his response to one word, and then only if it derived from

something he had memorized. Certain words and phrases captivated him, and he

would loop them aloud endlessly: trumpet vine, business, chrysanthemum.

At the same time, exhibited some prodigious, if isolated, mental skills.

By the age of 2, he could recite the 23rd Psalm (“Yea though I walk through the

valley of the shadow of death …”) and knew 25 questions and answers from the

Presbyterian catechism by heart. And the random humming he engaged in while

spinning blocks turned out not to be quite so random after all. Rather, he

always picked three notes that, if played simultaneously on a keyboard, would

blend into a perfect chord. Alone in thought, gave the impression of a

quite intelligent little boy, working through some sort of problem. “He appears

to be always thinking and thinking,” his father wrote. He was, in a

heartrendingly comprehensive phrase, “happiest when left alone.”

When Kanner finally met , he confirmed all this, and more. entered

the room, Kanner later recalled, and headed straight for the blocks and toys,

“without paying the least attention to the persons present.” Kanner had a trick

up his sleeve that today would draw disapproval: he pricked with a pin.

The result was revealing. didn’t like it—it hurt—but he didn’t like

Kanner any less for doing it. To Kanner, it seemed that he could not attach the

pain to the person who’d inflicted it. Throughout the visit, in fact,

remained completely indifferent to Kanner, as uninterested in him as in “the

desk, the bookshelf, or the filing cabinet.”

The surviving medical records of that initial visit contain a notation preceded

by a question mark: schizophrenia. It was one of the few diagnoses that came

even close to making sense, because it was clear that was essentially an

intelligent child, as a person exhibiting schizophrenia might easily be. But

nothing in his behavior suggested that experienced the hallucinations

typical of schizophrenia. He wasn’t seeing things that weren’t there, even if he

was ignoring the people who were.

Kanner kept under observation for two weeks, and then the Tripletts

returned to Mississippi—without answers. Kanner simply had no idea how to

diagnose the child. He would later write to Triplett, who had begun sending

frequent updates on : “Nobody realizes more than I do myself that at no

time have you or your husband been given a clear-cut and unequivocal …

diagnostic term.” It was dawning on him, he wrote, that he was seeing “for the

first time a condition which has not hitherto been described by psychiatric or

any other literature.”

He wrote those lines to in a letter dated September 1942, almost four years

after he’d first seen . The family had made three follow-up visits to

Baltimore, all equally inconclusive. Perhaps hoping to allay her frustration,

Kanner added that he was beginning to see a picture emerge. “I have now

accumulated,” he wrote, “a series of eight other cases which are very much like

Don’s.” He hadn’t gone public with this, he noted, because he needed “time for

longer observation.”

He had, however, been working on a name for this new condition. Pulling together

the distinctive symptoms exhibited by and the eight other children—their

lack of interest in people, their fascination with objects, their need for

sameness, their keenness to be left alone—he wrote : “If there is any name

to be applied to the condition of Don and those other children, I have found it

best to speak of it as ‘autistic disturbance of affective contact.’”

Kanner did not coin the term autistic. It was already in use in psychiatry, not

as the name of a syndrome but as an observational term describing the way some

patients with schizophrenia withdrew from contact with those around them. Like

the word feverish, it described a symptom, not an illness. But now Kanner was

using it to pinpoint and label a complex set of behaviors that together

constituted a single, never-before-recognized diagnosis: autism. (As it happens,

another Austrian, Hans Asperger, was working at the same time in Vienna with

children who shared some similar characteristics, and independently applied the

identical word—autistic to the behaviors he was seeing; his paper on the subject

would come out a year after Kanner’s, but remained largely unknown until it was

translated into English in the early 1990s.)

Kanner published his findings in 1943, in a journal called The Nervous Child.

Since writing to the previous year, he had added two more cases to this

total: 11 children, 11 histories. But he started the story with .

For all the progress that has made in the decades since—the driving, the

golfing—conversation is an art that continues to elude him. He initiates on

occasion, but his purpose is generally to elicit a piece of information he needs

(“What time is lunch?”) or to make a passing observation (his comment about the

sticker on our car). A regular chat, the casual back-and-forth of kicking around

an idea, is something he has never experienced.

When asked questions—even questions that invite some elaboration—he responds in

a terse, one-way manner, like a man working his way through a questionnaire.

Topic: ’s sense of achievement at being able to multiply in his head

“, how does it make you feel that it just comes out of your head?”

“It just comes out.”

“Does it make you feel good?”

“Oh yes, oh yes.”

“Can you describe it?”

“No, I can’t describe it.”

Topic: ’s memory of meeting the mentalist Franz Polgar

“, do you remember Franz Polgar?”

“Yes, I do remember Franz Polgar.”

[silence.]

“When did he come?”

“Actually he came twice. He came in 1950 and 1951.”

[Another long lapse.]

“Who was he?”

“He was a hypnotist.”

“Can you tell me what he was like? Was he an old man?”

“He was probably 55 years old. And he’d be 110 if he were living.”

As is clear from these exchanges, ’s thinking likes to go to numbers—even

when, as in this case, his arithmetic appears faulty—to dates and calculations

and constants that order the world concretely and do not require interpretation.

He even has a habit of assigning numbers to people he encounters, a sort of

internal indexing system. An old acquaintance named Buddy Lovett, who resides

one town over, in Morton, Mississippi, told us that had assigned him the

number 333 sometime in the late 1950s. Though he had not seen for several

years, he urged, with a hint of mischief, “Next time you see him, go ahead: ask

him what my number is.”

Indeed, the next day nailed Lovett’s number almost before hearing the end

of the question. We ran this test several times, presenting the names of people

all over Forest who had told us of being “numbered” over the years.

recalled every one, without hang or hiccup, though he can’t explain the

underlying system. The numbers just come to him, he says, and then stay forever.

Likewise, those who receive a Number seem to remember it for the rest of

their lives. An indelible distinction, a recognition they’ll never have to

share—it may feel akin to an honor.

That is almost certainly not what intends. Honor is one of those

concepts—an abstraction arbitrating between the ideal and the actual—unlikely to

come easily to someone like , who is far more comfortable in a world

ordered by established facts, by what literally is. This is why it is generally

believed that people with autism have difficulty lying, or appreciating a joke.

Although obviously enjoys pondering lists of people, places, and things,

he does not engage easily with implication, mood, or emotion.

Topic: The death of his mother, Triplett, who took care of for

52 years

“, when did your mother die?”

“It was 1985. May 1985.”

“Do you remember where you were?”

“I was at the bank. Her doctor had said it was just a matter of time … and I

got the word saying that she had passed away with congestive heart failure.”

“Do you remember how you felt?”

“It was rather expected. I wasn’t really downhearted or weeping or anything

like that.”

“Were you not downhearted because … ?”

“I just don’t react. Different people react differently to situations like

that.”

Asked whether he missed his mother, he replied—questionnaire again—“Yes, I miss

her.” He said he also misses his father, whose death in a 1980 car accident he

described in a similarly matter-of-fact manner. He recalls that his dad’s

accident was a shock and, again, that he didn’t cry.

Gerhardt tells the story of his friend Tony, who was 55 years old when he

got a crash course in the condolence hug. Tony, diagnosed with autism as an

adult, had lived all his life under the same roof as his mother. Then she died.

The funeral marked the first time in his life that Tony had been placed in the

category of “the bereaved,” and, as he mingled among the other funeral-goers, he

learned that people in his position must be prepared to accept some intense and

lingering hugs. He handled it fine, observing how his brother was responding to

the same sorts of approaches, and comprehending that the people doing this were

trying to help him not feel sad. Then he went home, hugged his neighbor, and

nearly got arrested.

It was the day after the funeral, and the elderly woman who lived next door—not

a close family friend, but someone kindly observing the custom of bringing meals

when there’s been a death—came to his door with food she’d prepared. Tony

thanked her, and she offered condolences.

According to Gerhardt, what happened next is a textbook example of the

kind of misunderstanding that bedevils people with autism. “Tony thought, Well,

she offered condolences. I’m supposed to hug her. So he went to hug her.”

Gerhardt notes that the woman undoubtedly sent off strong social signals that

she did not want to be embraced. But Tony failed to pick up on them: “He hugged

her, probably somewhat awkwardly—a little too long, a little too hard, a little

too low—because she went home and called the police [reporting] a sexual assault

by the man next door.”

To Gerhardt, this serves as a parable for interactions between people who have

autism and those who don’t: neither party did anything wrong, but neither knew

enough to get it right. Tony, a man bright enough to have earned a college

degree, simply lacked the instinctive experience—the teachable experience,

Gerhardt contends—to tell whether or not a person wants a hug. He was

sufficiently self-aware to understand that he was missing vital cues, but he had

no idea what they were. He later explained to Gerhardt: “The rules keep changing

on me. Every time I think I learn a new rule, you change it on me.”

The answer to this problem, Gerhardt argues, is the right kind of education for

the many Tonys out there. At present, he contends, schooling for children with

high-functioning levels of autism overemphasizes traditional academic

achievement—trying to learn French or the state capitals—at the expense of what

someone like Tony really needs, a set of social skills that keep him from making

mistakes such as hugging his neighbor the wrong way. These skills—like knowing

how to swipe a Visa card—are not generally taught to kids with autism. And once

they become adults, the teaching, in all too many cases, stops completely. In

general, state-funded education ends the day a person with autism turns 21.

Beyond that, there are no legal mandates, and there is very little funding.

“It’s like giving someone a wheelchair on a one-month rental,” Gerhardt says,

“and at the end of the month, they have to give it back, and walk.”

But there was another side to the equation in the hug incident: the neighbor’s

lack of education on the character of autism. Had she been more aware of Tony’s

condition, and what it might occasionally entail, she might not have felt so

threatened. At the very least, had she understood the situation, she could have

simply told Tony that she’d like him to let go, rather than hoping he’d read

social cues that were invisible to him.

As it was, the whole situation was quickly defused: Tony’s brother arrived and

offered both the neighbor and the police an explanation of Tony’s disability,

and she declined to press charges. But, as Gerhardt notes, a little more

information on both sides might have prevented this misunderstanding in the

first place.

lives alone now, in the house where his parents raised him. Enshrined in

honeysuckle and shaded by several old oaks, a few minutes’ walk from Forest’s

faded business district, the house needs some paint and repairs. Several of its

rooms—including the dining and living rooms, where his parents welcomed

visitors—are dark and musty with disuse. rarely enters that part of the

house. The kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom are home enough for him.

Except for once a month, that is, when he walks out the front door and leaves

town.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of ’s life is that he grew up to be an

avid traveler. He has been to Germany, Tunisia, Hungary, Dubai, Spain, Portugal,

France, Bulgaria, and Colombia—some 36 foreign countries and 28 U.S. states in

all, including Egypt three times, Istanbul five times, and Hawaii 17. He’s

notched one African safari, several cruises, and innumerable PGA tournaments.

It’s not wanderlust exactly. Most times, he sets six days as his maximum time

away, and maintains no contact afterward with people he meets along the way. He

makes it a mission to get his own snapshots of places he’s already seen in

pictures, and assembles them into albums when he gets home. Then he gets to work

planning his next foray, calling the airlines himself for domestic travel, and

relying on a travel agent in when he’s going overseas. He is, in all

likelihood, the best-traveled man in Forest, Mississippi.

This is the same man whose favorite pastimes, as a boy, were spinning objects,

spinning himself, and rolling nonsense words around in his mouth. At the time,

he seemed destined for a cramped, barren adulthood—possibly lived out behind the

windows of a state institution. Instead, he learned to golf, to drive, and to

circumnavigate the globe—skills he first developed at the respective ages of 23,

27, and 36. In adulthood, continued to branch out.

Autism is a highly individualized condition. The amount of room the brain makes

available for growth and adaptation differs, often dramatically, from one person

to the next. One can’t presume that duplicating ’s circumstances for

others with autism would have the effect of duplicating his results.

Still, it’s clear that reached his potential thanks, in large part, to

the world he occupied—the world of Forest, Mississippi—and how it decided to

respond to the odd child in its midst. Gerhardt speaks of the importance

of any community’s “acceptance” of those who have autism. In Forest, it appears,

was showered with acceptance, starting with the mother who defied experts

to bring him back home, and continuing on to classmates from his childhood and

golfing partners today. ’s neighbors not only shrug off his oddities, but

openly admire his strengths—while taking a protective stance with any outsider

whose intentions toward may not have been sufficiently spelled out. On

three occasions, while talking with townspeople who know , we were

advised, in strikingly similar language each time: “If what you’re doing hurts

Don, I know where to find you.” We took the point: in Forest, is “one of

us.”

For a time, ’s care was literally shifted out into the community. Kanner

believed that finding him a living situation in a more rural setting would be

conducive to his development. So in 1942, the year he turned 9, went to

live with the es, a farming couple who lived about 10 miles from town. His

parents saw him frequently in this four-year period, and Kanner himself once

traveled to Mississippi to observe the arrangement. He later said he was “amazed

at the wisdom of the couple who took care of him.” The es, who were

childless, put to work and made him useful. “They managed to give him

[suitable] goals,” Kanner wrote in a later report.

They made him use his preoccupation with measurements by having him dig a

well and report on its depth … When he kept counting rows of corn over and over,

they had him count the rows while plowing them. On my visit, he plowed six long

rows; it was remarkable how well he handled the horse and plow and turned the

horse around.

Kanner’s final observation on this visit speaks volumes about how was

perceived: “He attended a country school where his peculiarities were accepted

and where he made good scholastic progress.”

Likewise, during high school, when was again living back home with his

parents, it appears his ways were mostly taken in stride. Janelle Brown, who was

a few classes behind (and the recipient of Number 1,487),

remembers that although he was teased a few times, he was generally regarded as

a student who was enviably intelligent, even “brilliant”—again a legacy of his

famous multiplication skills and brick-counting act. She recalls his sitting

with a notebook and filling page after page with numbers, and her impression, as

well as that of others, that they were seeing evidence of a superior mind at

work.

It’s clear in all this that with the passage of time, ’s focus gradually

turned outward. He increasingly came to terms with how his world was shaped, at

the same time that his world was adjusting to him.

By 1957, he was a fraternity brother—Lambda Chi Alpha—at Millsaps College in

, Mississippi, majoring in French and performing in the men’s a cappella

choir. (The choir director, we were told by one member, never used a pitch pipe,

because he took any note he needed directly from .)

The Reverend Brister Ware, of the First Presbyterian Church in , was a

fraternity brother and roommate of ’s. “He was a dear friend,” Ware says,

recalling that he tried in various ways to give a hand up socially,

though “it was challenging to integrate him.” While training to be a

water-safety instructor, he set out to teach how to swim, “but the

coordination was not so good for him.” Undaunted, Ware set another goal: “I

thought I would try to open up his personality,” by introducing to what

was then a cool verbal affectation making the rounds, a way to pronounce the

word yes as “yeeeeeeees.” Ware’s encouragements—to “put a little emotion and

feeling and savoir faire into it”—again proved futile.

Ware was clearly rooting for his classmate, as were, he says, the other members

of the fraternity. “I knew he was a little bit strange,” he admits. “But he’s

genuine … I feel so lucky to have had him as a friend”—a friend, by the way, who

gave Ware a number: 569.

Throughout ’s youth, it helped, no doubt, that the Tripletts had money—the

money to get Leo Kanner’s attention in Baltimore, the funds to pay room and

board at the es’ farm. As the town’s bankers, they also had status, which

may have discouraged the sort of cruelty that can come to people like .

One insightful resident of Forest put it this way: “In a small southern town, if

you’re odd and poor, you’re crazy; if you’re odd and rich, all you are is a

little eccentric.” When was grown, the family bank employed him as a

teller, and an irrevocable trust fund established by his family pays his bills

to this day. The fund, according to his younger brother, Oliver, was designed

with controls that ensure, as he put it, “some gal wouldn’t be able to talk Don

into marrying her and then abscond.” In fact, has never expressed any

interest in girlfriends, nor has he had one.

But he has his brother—they dine together every Sunday, along with Oliver’s

wife—and he has a community that has always accepted him, since long before

people in town had heard the word autism. Tranquility, familiarity, stability,

and security—if we were talking about healing, these would create an ideal

environment. Forest provided all of them for , who didn’t need to heal. He

needed only to grow, and that he did, spectacularly. In one of her later letters

to Leo Kanner, Triplett reported: “He has taken his place in society very

well, so much better than we ever hoped for.” There were still difficulties, of

course—she confessed to the psychiatrist, by this time a friend, “I wish I knew

what his inner feelings really are”—but her fears of having borne a “hopelessly

insane child” were long past. By the time she died, had grown into

manhood, learning more about the world and his place in it than she could ever

have imagined in those early years.

But he never could count bricks. This, it turns out, is a myth.

explained how it had come about only after we’d been talking for some

time. It had begun with a chance encounter more than 60 years ago outside his

father’s law office, where some fellow high-school students, aware of his

reputation as a math whiz, challenged him to count the bricks in the county

courthouse across the street. Maybe they were picking on him a little; maybe

they were just seeking entertainment. Regardless, says he glanced quickly

at the building and tossed out a large number at random. Apparently the other

kids bought it on the spot, because the story would be told and retold over the

years, with the setting eventually shifting from courthouse to school building—a

captivating local legend never, apparently, fact-checked.

A common presumption is that people with autism are not good at telling fibs or

spinning yarns, that they are too literal-minded to invent facts that don’t

align with established reality. On one level, the story of and the bricks

demonstrates again the risks inherent in such pigeonholing. But on another

level, it reveals something unexpected about in particular. At the time

of that episode, he was a teenager, barely a decade removed from the near-total

social disconnect that had defined his early childhood. By adolescence, however,

it seems he’d already begun working at connecting with people, and had grasped

that his math skills were something that others admired.

We know that, because we finally asked him directly why he’d pulled that number

out of the air all those years ago. He closed his eyes to answer, and then

surprised us a final time. Speaking as abruptly as ever, and with the usual

absence of detail, he said simply, and perhaps obviously, “I just wanted for

those boys to think well of me.”

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/10/autism-8217-s-first-child/82\

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by The Atlantic Monthly Group. .