In a Different Key: The Story of Autism (22 page)

Rimland had been the same way until he
lost his trust in psychiatry. Coincidentally, around this time, psychiatry had also been losing trust in itself. One reason Rimland received such a warm embrace at Stanford during his fellowship there was the fact that his book had dealt psychiatry—and its cousin, psychology—a satisfying punch in the nose. While the Freudians still ruled in the plush settings of private practice, a younger generation of psychiatrists and psychologists, at Stanford and elsewhere, were pushing back against the authoritarian certainty of their elders. Psychology departments had caught the rebellious spirit of the day and were impatient to have their work actually benefit society, broadly and urgently. In this pursuit, experimentation boomed, and the walls began crumbling that had kept apart fields like neurology and computer science, biochemistry and genetics. The time was ripe for iconoclasts.

And here was Rimland persuasively daring families to challenge authority alongside him. Shortly after his speech, some of those families
established the Santa Barbara Society for Autistic Children, a chapter of NSAC. The women took the lead, with mothers elected to the posts of president, vice president, and so on. At first, they embarked onto more familiar ground, holding yard sales to raise funds for the group. But soon they moved on to demanding meetings with school officials and making the rounds of pediatricians’ offices in town, seeking support and understanding, and leaving behind leaflets to explain autism to other parents.

Among the dads, George became perhaps the most active, launching a letter-writing campaign he wouldn’t give up for years. He wrote the board of education, the newspaper, even the governor, Ronald Reagan. And he went along with Alice when she came up with the idea of picketing the school superintendent’s office. The superintendent had, after all, received them in his office, more than once, and heard them out as they presented their pleas for some kind of educational support for Frankie. But nothing had changed for Frankie. He was still stuck at home. And so Alice had decided it was time to experiment with some political theater.

Maybe, to passersby, they looked comical out there, with their mini-protest in the sunshine—especially when the sprinkler came on and sent them hightailing it for dry ground. But to Alice and George, and the other parents who were also getting nowhere with the schools, there wasn’t much about the fight for their kids that they found humorous. Unfortunately, before their desperate pleas on behalf of their children’s need for education received a fair hearing, tragedy would ensue.

—

A
LICE
B
ARTON REMEMBERS
precisely the moment she heard that Alec Gibson, her friend Velna’s husband, had snapped. Alice was up on a stepladder in the living room, one ear on the television as she set about taking down the Christmas tree. It was the first week of January 1971, and Frankie had been with Alice and George for six months. Then the news came—an urgent story about a man named Gibson and a shooting in the neighborhood. She turned to look and then began shrieking. “Oh my God, George! Look at this! It’s Alec Gibson!” As they stared, overcome, at the TV, Alice still perched on the ladder, George could only breathe out the obvious: “My God, what’s he done?”

Perhaps only Velna Gibson, secretary of the Santa Barbara chapter of NSAC, had been aware of the darkness that had been gathering inside her husband. Alec Gibson had once been a content man, confident in his ability to provide for his family, competent in his career as a machinist in the aerospace industry. In 1958, Alec and Velna had relocated from Cape Canaveral to Lompoc, California, along with their
girls, Junie and Sandy—who were thirteen and eleven—and the baby, Dougie, who’d been born the previous November. There was a job connected to the nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base, and a new home, where Alec himself, who was good at these things, set to work putting in a new yard.

It was his first heart attack—the first of several—that seemed to change Alec Gibson forever. It was a severe episode, and it meant abandoning not just the yard project but also his job at the plant. Gibson, practically overnight, went from feeling robust and confident to seeing himself, in his mid-fifties, as a near invalid.
Then Dougie was diagnosed with autism.

By the age of three, their son was displaying classic symptoms. Before that, Velna had thought that Dougie, if anything, was ahead of most other children his age. He climbed out of his playpen at six months. At twenty months, he had toilet-trained himself. At twenty-four months, he knew how to work the dials on the washing machine.

His way with toys, however, was strange from the start. He’d have them spread out on the floor, and then, methodically, he would pick each one up in turn, play with it awhile, and then move on to the next toy in line. Eventually, he abandoned conventional toys altogether and started spinning things—pot lids and so forth. This became his new, all-consuming pastime—that, and banging his head against the wall.

Language never came. He had a phrase—
coolacoolacoola
—that he recited singsong to himself on and off—and a single word he reserved to address the rest of the world: “muh.” It was his answer to any question or statement from his mother and father. “Are you cold?” “Muh.” “We’re putting on your socks now.” “Muh.” “Come over here, Dougie.” “Muh.”

That sharp intelligence Velna thought she saw early on was still there. It showed in his beautiful eyes, which were alert and inquisitive. Still a toddler, he developed a taste for recorded music, and he figured out the complicated stereo system his father had built from parts out in the garage. When the overture from
The Sound of Music
could be heard through the kitchen window, Velna knew where Dougie had disappeared to. He also managed to overcome the sliding bolt system Alec had installed high up on his daughter Junie’s
bedroom door, supposedly out of Dougie’s reach, to keep him away from her record collection.

Another specific like: Coke and French fries. A specific dislike: the sight of airplanes, which set off tantrums. This mysterious blend of strong likes and stronger dislikes instilled in his mother the belief that there was a “normal” Dougie trapped somewhere beyond the strange behaviors, operating inside his body but just out of her reach. To Velna, Dougie became a boy waiting to be rescued, or perhaps healed by God. She had, shortly after his diagnosis, converted to Christian Science, and spent a good deal of time in prayer for her son.

But Velna wasn’t just waiting for a miracle. She threw herself into getting whatever professional help she could find in and around Lompoc. There were some promising leads in the beginning. Now and then, in one special-ed program or another, a space would become available, and she would pack Dougie into the car for the obligatory trial day in the classroom. But it never worked out. Some places rejected Dougie outright as beyond help. Others agreed to give him a chance, but it wouldn’t be long before Velna, arriving for pickup in the afternoon, would be pulled aside, and gently but firmly informed that a mistake had been made and that Dougie should not come back.

His sister Junie moved out in 1964, marrying young and not at all selectively, to escape the sorrow at home. Dougie had moved past his toddler years, showing almost no improvement, while the search for help and the cost of programs ate through the family savings. Alec sold the Pepsi stock he’d held for years to guarantee his retirement. Then he sold his beloved homemade stereo system. Then, one at a time, the family parted with their better pieces of furniture.

Ultimately, when Velna finally found a program that would take Dougie, the household itself had to be broken up. The Kennedy Institute, three hours away in Los Angeles, specialized in educating the mentally retarded. Again, it was an imperfect fit for a boy with autism, but the institute had committed to taking Dougie when no other place would. The Gibsons had to sell the house to pay for it. It was a day program, and Dougie would need someplace to spend nights. So Velna and Dougie moved to Los Angeles, where she found part-time work in day care, while Alec and his younger daughter, Sandy, stayed behind
in Lompoc in a rented apartment. The goal was to give Dougie language, but two years later, he still only said “Muh.” Alec was discouraged. “This isn’t working,” he said to Velna during one of their few weekend visits together. “We have to try something else.”

Velna wasn’t ready to give up, but when Alec suffered another heart attack, she and Dougie came home. Not long after that, with little to hold them in Lompoc, they all moved north to Santa Barbara, where they had relatives. The city’s then progressive reputation also gave them hope that Dougie might have a shot in the public school system. Instead, they found themselves beating the same path George and Alice had traveled with Frankie. Meetings with the Santa Barbara schools were followed by vague promises, then rejections from one classroom after another.

Finally, they took the step they’d been trying to avoid all along and placed their now eleven-year-old son in the one institution they knew would never turn him down—the state mental hospital in Camarillo. There would be no bills to pay, at least. It was the only place they could afford.

It was Alec who cut this experiment short. Since driving Dougie to Camarillo for his initial commitment there, he and Velna had been making two round-trips there each week, taking Dougie home on Fridays, and then back to the institution on Sunday afternoons. The pickups went fine. Dougie always rushed into their arms to give them hugs, evidence all by itself that he was making the type of connection to them that autism was supposed to hinder. Velna took it as a sign that Camarillo was doing him some good.

But then came Sunday, and the return trip, which was torture for everyone involved. Without fail, the moment the institution walls came into view, Dougie would explode. Screaming and flailing, he had to be dragged into the building by white-jacketed attendants. It ripped into Alec’s already weak heart to see this, week after week, and after nearly three months of it, he called a halt. One Friday, he and Velna picked Dougie up from Camarillo and never brought him back.

Their home life settled down into an immutable pattern. Dougie needed twenty-four-hour supervision, and since only Velna could work, Alec looked after him during the days. The two of them apparently grew
quite close in this period, as they would have to, given that playdates with other children were not an option, and that Alec, now nearly penniless, had also turned rather reclusive. When he and Dougie weren’t alone together for hours in the upstairs apartment of the two-family home they rented on East Figueroa Street, they were out on walks together, just the two of them. Neighbors noticed them but didn’t interact much with the lonely-looking pair—the unusually good-looking boy, somewhat tall for his age, who made strange sounds as he passed by; and the lean, gray-haired man who was always by his side, saying little.

It was sometime during this period that Alec got hold of a Beretta .45. Exactly when and how has never been clear. Alec took his last walk with Dougie on January 4, 1971. They went to McDonald’s, Dougie’s favorite place, for his favorite meal, which, at age thirteen, was still French fries and Coke. It was around one thirty p.m. when they returned home. The street outside was quiet, as the neighborhood children had just gone back to school after Christmas break. Dougie lay down for a nap on a small cot in the dayroom, and Alec went into the kitchen and wrote a note:

I have done a terrible thing. I know that I cannot be forgiven. Don’t want to see you or anyone
.

He left the note standing up against the telephone on the kitchen counter and went in to look at his sleeping son. It is not known how long he stood there, but at some point, Alec lifted the Beretta and shot Dougie in the head.

Dougie did not die right away. That would happen later, in the ambulance. When the ambulance team first saw him, they reported that he was still gurgling for breath on the daybed.

Alec likely didn’t see any of that. Immediately after firing, he’d returned to the kitchen, placed the gun in its original box next to the note, and then called the police. Then he stepped outside and sat down on the front steps, waiting for the first sound of sirens to carry in on the afternoon breeze.

—

“R
ETARDED
S
ON
I
S
D
EAD
,” the
Santa Barbara Press
reported the next morning on an inside page. The day after that, school officials gave interviews attempting to correct the record, but they also got it wrong. “Douglas was not mentally retarded,” one of them informed the paper; he “had been diagnosed as emotionally disturbed.” A source at the Camarillo State Hospital, where he’d spent three months, came up with yet a third variant:
“schizophrenic reaction, childhood type,” someone told the reporter who called.

Finally,
a letter to the editor appeared in the
Press
that clarified the nature of Dougie’s condition. The woman who wrote it, Mary Ellen Nava, identified herself “as the parent of an autistic child like Dougie.” Actually, she and Alice Barton had worked on the letter together, but only Mary Ellen’s name appeared in print. She opened her letter by posing a question about the father who had shot his son: “What went through the mind of this man?”

It was the obvious thing to ask. Nava was president of the Santa Barbara Society for Autistic Children and one of the mothers who had attended that Ventura meeting with Bernard Rimland. Her son Eddie, three years younger than Velna’s Dougie, was almost as disabled as Dougie. He didn’t speak and had a tendency to attack his own skin with his fingernails, scratching himself raw till bleeding, which often led to infections. He had been luckier, though, in finding placement in a special-education class where his behaviors were just barely tolerated. Dougie’s, on the other hand, were always just too extreme, and Mary Ellen could see what Velna, now a good friend, had to go through each time another school expelled him.