A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (28 page)

No, wait. Here’s a brief reprieve. Future Horizons has invited me to speak in Anchorage, Alaska, that last bastion of Dr. Hollander’s risk takers.

It’s May. The winter avalanches are still frozen hard to the mountain gullies and the trees give no sign of sprouting buds. But daylight is already stretching out, putting forth long evenings of blue dusk with a midnight rim of light waiting to turn into dawn. Before you know it the sun is up all over again, throwing its beams in between the low buildings and across the harbor.

Everwhere in Anchorage extremes jostle together: teetotalers and staggering drunks, atheists and Born Again Christians, mil-lionaires in chalets and bums in broken down trailers, boredom and adrenaline-rush emergencies. Most of all, endless sun or endless night.

“How do you explain the darkness to an autistic child,” a father asks. “How do you make him understand that the sun won’t come up till 10:30 a.m., and will be gone by 3:00 p.m.? We’ve tried everything, every kind of light you can buy.”

I have no answer. Instead I urge hanging onto something that has meaning for you and end up quoting T.S. Eliot.

As I come out of the conference hall a mother yells, “Bingo!” Then seeing that I look surprised, fills me in. “For you it’s T.S. Eliot, for me it’s Tuesday night Bingo!”

We have lunch in the lobby of the conference hall where the walls, carpet, and stairs have been done in pale summer blossoms of Inuit color, lime, brick, blue, aqua, and orange.

A mother wants me to advise her on her eighteen-year-old twin Asperger boys. “My boys don’t like any kind of doubt in their life,” she says. “They want everything regimented. All problems must have black and white answers. They long to go into the army, they love the army routine and the army wants them. They’ve passed all the tests, but I feel so troubled. Should I tell the army doctor that they’re Asperger? Would the army doctor care?” I don’t have an answer.

Another mother comes up to me, starts out, “It was when you talked about character—” She can get no further, flings herself into my arms and sobs. Again I have no answer.

After the conference a mother drives me along the narrow two-lane highway between the mountains with their ice gullies and the frozen tidal flats. She tells me how the town’s people will plant the highway median strip.

“One of these days soon, we’ll all turn out for it. We’ll clear away the winter debris and plant the whole length of highway with flowers. I wish you could see it, flowers love our Alaskan summers.”

She points out the tidal flats. “Those flats are deceptively dangerous. It looks like you could walk on them over to that other mountain, but don’t try it. The mud will suck you in up to your knees and unless the rescue team gets to you before the tide comes in, you’ll drown. The rescue team has a water pump that forces water into the mud under your feet, it gives you a little man-made tide that lifts you out. Don’t ever think you can beat the mud. In winter the avalanches shoot down, cover the highway and bury your car. I never let my kids drive without a cell phone and a flare in case they get caught.”

The local bar and grill is Humpy’s, named for the humpback halibut they catch in Anchorage, cut in chunks and plunge into a deep fry. Delicious beyond words. Humpy’s is a dead ringer for the TV show
Northern Exposure
, complete to bar stools that don’t match and mix match customers.

“You’re from New York?” they exclaim in cordial amazement. “Hey, the drinks are on us!” Humpy’s calls where we come from the “Lower Forty-Eight.”

I listen to their yarns, their risky adventures, and think of the 1862 Homestead Act which declared that any United States citizen who was head of a family or twenty-one years of age might apply for a hundred and sixty acres of unappropriated public land and might acquire title to it by living there and cultivating it for five years. Right up to the Act’s end in the 1950s, families and companies were still gambling on it here in Alaska.

The Homestead Act also put me in mind of the 1875 adventures of the original Grandin brothers (Dick’s grandfather and great uncle) in the North Dakota Red River Valley territory. North Dakota must have been as cold and remote as the Klondike when those two brothers took Horace Greeley’s advice to heart, set out for the west, and ended up organizing the biggest wheat farm in the world.

What wonderful family traits those two brothers have handed down to Temple and her siblings. The thought of them is just what I need to send me on the last lap of my journey: a genetic look at both sides of the family.

*
Treatment & Education of Autistic and Related Communication Handicapped Children. An international, interdisciplinary center for research, service and training in autism. Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

**
Educational organization specializing in the education of children with special needs; also in the education of the professionals and pre-professionals who serve them.

*
“Don’t catch the dog’s eye,” we say, “or he’ll come over and beg for attention.”

*
Canaries sing out of the left side of their trachea.

*
“Asperger’s,” first defined by Dr. Hans Asperger, is a milder form of the autism syndrome.

*
New Insights in The Diagnosis, Neurobiology, Genetics and Treatment of Autism
. The Mount Sinai School of Medicine Symposium 11/2/03.

**
Ibid

Chapter 10

The Legacy of Genes

John Livingston Grandin, Dick’s grandfather and Temple’s great grandfather, and his brother, William James Grandin, were French Huguenots conducting oil drilling operations in Tidioute, Pennsylvania in 1860. Oil paid off handsomely but not as handsomely as it might have. According to family legend, Dick’s grandfather was about to negotiate a deal with old man Rockefeller and had set up an appointment to meet him. Rockefeller kept him waiting and Dick’s grandfather lost his temper, a trait already apparent in the Grandin men. Refusing to wait longer, he walked out before Rockefeller arrived, thus forfeiting a chance to be in on the ground floor with Standard Oil, a loss the Grandins have lamented ever since.

However, along with the temper came an unerring Grandin talent for organizing existing systems: leasing and subleasing farms, conducting drilling operations, buying and selling crude oil, and building pipelines.

Along with the systemizing came another gift, perhaps even more valuable: a canny eye for potential.

“… In 1868, John L. Grandin and A. Clark Baum established a general banking business … Two years later William J. [Grandin] purchased Baum’s interest and the institution became the Grandin Bros. Bank. The Grandin Bank, founded on oil money, was famed from coast to coast for its solvency; it helped Jay Cooke when he financed the Civil War. [There must have been money transactions before the bank was formally set up.] When the Cooke firm went broke in 1873, the Grandins obtained the collateral security on their loans: thousands of acres of undeveloped land in North Dakota. Jay Cooke’s share of financing western railroads….
*

“… John L. Grandin was a good trader and, rather than take fifteen cents on the dollar, decided in 1875 … to go west and inspect the Red River Valley of North Dakota.”

Noting “the thick deposit of clay sub-soil and two to three feet of dark rich surface soil,” he figured it would make good wheat land.

Family lore has it that neither Grandin brother knew much about farming. However, they were quick to see that, although the local farmers owned their own farm equipment, they didn’t know how to organize themselves into larger, more effective working systems. The Grandins, good at systems, measured off their acreage in terms of wagon wheel revolutions and figured out the precise amount of seed it would take to plant the entire tract of land with wheat. They then determined how many workers, mules, carts, etc., they would need to plow the acreage, plant the seed, raise the crop and harvest it. Next, they built dormitories to house the workers and their families, figured out the cost of maintaining the dormitories and feeding everybody. They fed them well, as the carefully kept records attest. Anticipating the transportation of the wheat, they looked to the river and bought up river frontage.

“The Grandin brothers constructed and operated a line of river steamers to transport grain and supplies for their farm. This unique aspect of bonanza farming was possible because the Grandins possessed four miles of frontage on the Red River, which enabled them to transport their wheat by river to Fargo, the nearest railroad center … where the Grandins owned a 50,000 bushel elevator, for transshipment to the railroad … tying the state and the Northwest to the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.”
*

The Grandin systemizing talent put into effect the first undertaking of its kind: a corporate farm.

Young America was booming. An up-and-coming lumber company wanted to buy some of the Grandin land. According to family lore, the brothers again took a look at the land potential and figured that payment in lumber company stock would end up being worth more than ready cash. Once again, their vision paid off. The lumber company turned out to be Weyerhouser.

Now seriously rich, the next generation Grandins returned east and decided to move from Tidioute, Pennsylvania to a big city where they could enjoy a grander lifestyle. They chose Boston, bought a house—first on Commonwealth Avenue and then on the Fenway—but never quite plumbed Boston as the brothers had envisioned North Dakota wheat. Neither Brahmins nor Blue Stockings, they adhered rigidly to what they perceived as the new “society” system, with no insight into Boston eccentricity: the Boston whim of picking and choosing friends with little regard for a rank it no longer cared to feature since it had possessed it for so many generations. Despite their lack of insight, the Grandins accomplished their goal. However, unlike old Boston, they continued to guard their position. No mocking attitudes, no stepping out of line, and no love affairs with impoverished artists. Those were the rules.

All this had been silently drilled into Dick. He had seen his father take a stand against his older sister whose heart was in the arts. Though she was actively discouraged from painting watercolors, she painted them anyway, arranging with a gallery to exhibit her work. Her father, fearful she might sully the family’s social standing, bought up all the paintings before the gallery opening. Dick’s sister was then discouraged from marrying the sweet, arty, moneyless man she loved. Instead, she was urged to marry a social scoundrel from Newport who beat her up and stole her jewelry.

Through it all and through the rest of her life, his sister maintained her love of the arts, her dignity, and her genuine gift for friendship. Old Boston adored her. Her father could never figure out why.