by Annette Wood
In 1975, Jim Uhl sought out Temple after learning about her designs. He hung out around the stockyards in Scottsdale and wanted to build cattle-handling facilities, but he, like everyone else, had no experience in designing them. He heard there was a young woman who had successfully planned some, and coaxed Temple into meeting him at a café. She was suspicious at first. Many men at the stockyards had treated her badly. Only gradually did she relax.
“There were no other designers then for livestock facilities,” said Uhl.11 Temple understood cattle like no one else, even if she was from the East. Even if she was a woman.
Temple learned to carefully choose new projects. “Developers must choose carefully companies with management that believes in what they are doing, and they need to inspect every detail. Early adapters must be supervised at every step of installation and startup to make sure that the new method works correctly,” Temple wrote.12
Temple was fortunate to have met Jim Uhl, who treated her with respect and believed in her designs. Likewise, Jim’s company, Agate Construction, flourished partly because of Temple. Her photo is on Agate Construction’s corporate wall.
One of Temple’s early clients was not completely satisfied with her work. Temple thought about giving up her freelance business as a result. “My black and white thinking led me to believe that clients would always be 100 percent satisfied. Fortunately, Jim Uhl wouldn’t let me give up. He pushed me and kept asking for the next drawing. Now I know that 100 percent client satisfaction is impossible,” she said.13 Jim and his crews have built twenty of Temple’s projects in eleven different states. Temple traveled and worked right alongside them. “I thought I was a hard worker,” said Jim. “But Temple can outdo me. She works on whatever needs to be done, even dragging steel with the guys.” And she works seven days a week, sometimes three months at a time.
In 1979 Temple, Jim, and his construction crew traveled to Boston to build a demonstration cattle-handling facility for the Massachusetts Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. They created a farm complete with pigs, sheep, goats, and cows for schoolchildren to visit. City children have few opportunities to be exposed to animals, and this provided one.
Temple and Jim became lifelong friends, but she did not get along with all the men she worked with. It took work, but Temple learned to be tactful and diplomatic. She has learned never to go over the head of the person who hired her unless she has their permission.
“I quickly learned that I wouldn’t keep a job for long if I refused to do work, or argued with my boss or co-workers over assignments,” she wrote.14
“I caused trouble for Tom Rohrer after I wrote a letter to the president of Swift about a bad equipment installation, which caused cattle to suffer. The president was embarrassed. He felt threatened and told Tom to get rid of me,” she recalled.15
Fortunately, Tom did not fire her. He recognized her good intentions. He knew she was technically right, but socially wrong. This is one of the reasons people with autism need mentors.
Temple adds: “I have learned to avoid situations where I could be exploited or my employers might feel threatened. I learned diplomacy by reading about international negotiations and using them as models.” She recommends reading the Wall Street Journal. The paper’s articles were extremely helpful in increasing her understanding of workplace dynamics, social/office etiquette, and even more nebulous topics like office politics.16
Like her great-grandfather, John Grandin, Temple saw opportunities and she grabbed them. Like him, she has the qualities of persistence and courage. Her success is an inspiration to all.
CHAPTER 5
TEMPLE IN THE EIGHTIES
Temple founded her own company, Grandin Livestock Handling Systems, in 1980. Her business grew out of her lifelong fascination with cattle and her talent for drawing. She put the two together in forming her business. “I saw a need in the livestock industry that hadn’t been met, the need for a more humane system of slaughtering cattle and producing meat for American consumers,” said Temple.1
She designed the single file race (chute), the curved race (chute), stockyard pens, ramps for livestock, and cattle dip vats. She used her empathy with cows to design equipment for them. She designed a conduit for cows the way a hose is a conduit for water. She had observed that cows like to stay with the herd and that cattle follow a curved path more easily.
“There are two reasons for this: First, the cattle can’t see what is at the other end and become frightened and, secondly, the curved equipment takes advantage of the animal’s behavior,” she observed.2
Her sense of animals’ moods and feelings is strong. “When I’m with cattle, it’s not at all cognitive,” she noted. “I know what the cow’s feeling.”
Temple relaxes when she’s with cows. She feels like she’s surrounded by friends. She sits in the grass with them and feeds them bits of hay. She lies down and allows them to nuzzle her. She knows they’re curious.
Temple imagines what it is like to experiencing things through the cow’s sensory system. She places herself inside the cow’s body and recreates what it feels.
Cattle have a wide, panoramic visual field, because they are a prey species, watchful and wary for signs of danger. Members of a prey species such as cattle or sheep have to flee when they spot a predator. Even though cattle and sheep today are usually in pastures or feedlots where they seldom have predators, they’ve retained this skill. Temple takes this into consideration when designing equipment for cattle.
Like Temple, cattle and sheep have acute hearing. “Farm animals have sensitive hearing and are sensitive to high-pitched sounds. They can hear high-frequency sounds that people cannot hear. The human ear is most sensitive to sounds in the 1000–3000 hz range and cattle and horses are most sensitive to frequencies at 8000 hz and above,” she wrote.3
Temple says that cattle startle easily and are overly anxious. Both cows and persons with autism experience a great deal of fear. Temple has spent much of her life avoiding panic attacks. Beginning in adolescence, waves of sweaty-palmed, gut-wrenching, stomach-churning fear engulfed Temple constantly, restricting her diet to Jell-O and yogurt for days, because the panic attacks affected her intestines.
Along with soothing herself with her squeeze machine, she started taking medication—50 mg of Tofranil, generic name imipramine—in the 1980s to reduce her anxiety. She learned about it from an article in Psychology Today4 and read scientific journal articles before she asked her doctor to put her on the medication.5 Within a week, 90 percent of her anxiety and panic was gone.6
With the medication, she says, “I am more relaxed and get along better with people. Stress-related problems like colitis are gone.”7 She does not perseverate nearly as much: “Reducing anxiety helped to reduce perseveration.”8
This does not mean that Tofranil is appropriate for everyone who has autism. Autistics are all individuals, varied in skills, interests, likes, and dislikes, and have differing nervous systems. Medication that works for one does not necessarily work for another.
Because she wanted contact with others like herself, Temple attended her first Autism Society of America (ASA) conference (which was then called the National Society for Autistic Children in the mid-1980s). She met Dr. Ruth Sullivan, parent of Joseph, an autistic child. Dr. Sullivan was the first president of NASC.*
Dr. Sullivan asked Temple if she’d be willing to speak at the next ASA annual conference, then the only national conference about persons with autism. She agreed.
At the next conference, Temple told the audience about her sound sensitivities. “It’s like being tied to a railroad track and the train’s coming,” she said. On the topic of underwear, she described her profound skin sensitivity: “I don’t have the words to tell you how painful it is.”9 She talked about how hard it was to communicate what she felt, and about her difficulty in understanding others.
At that time, answers to the puzzle of autism were largely undiscovered. Families ventured into the w
orld of autism with little explanation, scant information, and poor understanding. Without answers, family life became more and more topsy-turvy. Disappointment, despair, and frustration seeped in as parents struggled with a child’s autism. As neurotypical persons, the audience grabbed this opportunity for answers.
“Temple spoke from her own experience, and her insight was impressive. There were tears in more than one set of eyes that day,” Dr. Sullivan remembered.10
After that, Temple began speaking regularly at autism conferences. At first, she was not a good speaker. “She didn’t seem to be addressing the audience, had no eye contact, might actually be facing in another direction, and could not take questions after the lecture,” noted famed neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks.11
However, she persevered and continued speaking about autism. She was familiar with the scientific facts about autism and had personal experience. Lorna King, founder and CEO of the Children’s Center for Neurodevelopmental Studies, spoke at conferences with Temple. She noted big improvements in Temple’s presentations as she continued speaking to groups. King wrote to Temple after one conference, praising her progress: “At this conference, you handled questions easily, rubbed shoulders with the crowd during breaks, shook hands without hesitation, and generally seemed calm and self-assured.”12
Buoyed and encouraged by King’s praise, Temple continued to speak at both autism and animal behavior conferences and her skills increased even more.
An editor at Arena Press heard about Temple speaking to groups about autism and asked if she would write a book about her experiences. Since Temple had no writing experience at the time, Arena Press enlisted Margaret M. Scariano as her co-author. Their collaboration, entitled Emergence: Labeled Autistic, was published in 1986.
Dr. Bernard Rimland, director of the Autism Research Institute, wrote the foreword. He had written his own groundbreaking book, Infantile Autism, in 1964.
Dr. Rimland and his wife took Temple to lunch. He remembers, “Her loud, unmodulated voice, characteristic of autistic persons, brought puzzled stares from the other diners. I risked offending her by asking her several times to lower her voice. She wasn’t offended. She was open, candid, and quite unembarrassed. Here was an individual who recognized that she had oddities and peculiarities of speech and manner as a result of her autism.
“Not only was Temple not offended, she knew that improvement was appropriate and needed. It’s a pleasure to deal with a person so forthright and uninterested in guile.”13
William Carlock, Temple’s beloved science teacher from high school, composed the preface to her book. Carlock wrote: “Temple has demonstrated, without question, that there is hope for the autistic child—that deep, constant caring, understanding, acceptance, appropriately high expectations, and support and encouragement help him (or her) reach his potential.”14
Temple’s book was a sensation, since people with autism don’t typically develop enough language to write a book. It was the first of many books she wrote or edited.
But Temple did not have a huge breakthrough in her ability to cope with autism. She took a series of incremental steps, including during her journey to her PhD.
Stan Curtis in the animal science department at the University of Illinois kept a spot open for Temple, who was weak in math ability, to study for her PhD in Animal Science.15 In the early 1980s, she enrolled in the University of Illinois to study and work with Dr. Bill Greenough, who became her dissertation co-adviser.
Temple was interested in the differing effects between barren environments and stimulating environments and the welfare of pigs. She studied twelve pigs in a barren environment, with hard plastic floors. Twelve other pigs were in an enriched environment with lots of straw, plastic balls, old telephone books, and metal pipe. Every day Temple changed something. She discovered, “New straw is exciting, old straw is boring.”16 Pigs are obsessed with straw.
Pigs are also driven to explore their world. One pen of Temple’s research pigs at the University of Illinois learned to unscrew the bolts that held the pen divider to the wall.17 Temple screwed the bolts in and the pigs unscrewed them.
Greenough’s neuroscience class opened up the world of brain research to Temple. She respected and admired Dr. Greenough and said she learned so much in his class, and that it was the best class she took for her PhD. She received her PhD in Animal Science from the University of Illinois in 1989. Her thesis centered on the effect of environmental enrichment on the behavior and central nervous systems of animals. She concluded that the brain is very plastic and responsive to stimulation from the environment.
Once again, Temple was ahead of the times. Years later, studies on brain plasticity, growth of new neural circuits, and connections in response to stimulants were rampant. Dr. Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist from the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center, has been researching the subject. He spoke at Technology/Entertainment/Design (TED) in 2004, saying, “You can do things tomorrow that you can’t do today. Individual skills and abilities are shaped by the environment, constructed from a wealth of experiences. The brain has a very powerful ability to change itself well into adulthood.
“The brain is at the mercy of the sound environment in which it is received, but the changes induced by skills are massive. What you pay attention to is why you are a specialist in your skills. Your brain is very different from the brain of someone 100 years ago and certainly 1000 years ago.”
Dr. Merzenich and other neuroplasticity researchers caused quite a stir when they demonstrated that the adult brain can change in fundamental ways, like manual dexterity and perception of sounds.
For more than three decades, Dr. Merzenich has been a leading pioneer in brain plasticity research. He is founding CEO of Scientific Learning Corporation, which markets and distributes software that applies principles of brain plasticity to assist children with language learning and reading.
Dr. Merzenich uses his research to help children with autism and their malfunctioning sound systems. An excellent example of brain plasticity is Temple herself. Her language receiver in childhood was distorted and undoubtedly noisy. She has continued to grow and improve throughout her life.
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* Ruth Sullivan was one of the chief lobbyists for Public Law 94–142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, which was later revised and renamed as the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA). This bill guarantees public education up to the age of twenty-one for all children in the United States. Before passage of this law, individual school districts in most states were allowed to choose whether they were willing to educate a child with disabilities.
CHAPTER 6
TEMPLE IN THE NINETIES
In 1991, Uta Frith translated Hans Asperger’s work into English. Asperger’s insights provided awareness of a broad continuum of autistic disorders. And Frith’s own book (as editor), Autism and Asperger Syndrome, gave an account of Asperger’s as a distinct variant of autism, considerably widening the concept.
“There are children and adults who can manage to pass as ‘normal,’ yet are fundamentally autistic,” said Oliver Sacks, a professor of neurology and author. He wrote about Temple and six others in An Anthropologist on Mars.
Including Asperger’s in Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders-IV in 1994 significantly paved the way for reframing autism as a spectrum. Asperger’s quickly gained a reputation as high-functioning autism.
This new awareness of Asperger’s partially paved the way for Temple’s recognition. Parents, teachers, and family members were dealing with a diagnosis they knew nothing about. At autism conferences, they eagerly listened to Temple’s explanations of the world from her perspective.
She reached even more people after Thinking in Pictures was published in 1995. She had also written an article in 1992 about the hug machine for the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology.
By now, Temple had upgraded the machine to include thick foam rubber padding and
deep pressure stimulation. Users can relax fully, because the body is completely supported.
“The contoured padding provides an even pressure across the body. The foam-padded headrest and padded neck opening are covered with soft fake fur. When the neck opening closes around the neck, it enhances the feeling of being surrounded and contained by the embrace of the deep touch pressure squeeze,” Temple explained.1
We now know that autism is caused by neurological abnormalities that shut the child off from neurotypical touching and hugging. The hug machine provides touches and hugs in a way autistics can accept without experiencing overwhelming physical sensations. It is currently used in many classrooms for autistic children.
When Temple used the machine for fifteen minutes, it reduced anxiety for up to forty-five to sixty minutes.2 She used it twice a day for maximum effect.3
As Temple relaxed, her relationship with her pet changed. “The cat that used to run away from me now would stay with me, because I had learned to caress him with a gentler touch. I had to be comforted before I could give comfort to the cat.” She also noticed she flinched less often when people touched her.
About the same time her article about the hug machine was published, Temple was hired as an associate professor in the department of animal science at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. It proved a good fit. Colorado State provides a strong focus on agriculture and livestock studies for its students.
She had been there only a year when she met Mark Deesing. Mark had grown up in Salt Lake City and went to horseshoeing school because his family didn’t have enough money to send him to college. He was working as a farrier to make a living and interested in getting involved in horse behavior because he had some research ideas.
A horseshoeing professor at Colorado State invited him to come and talk about horseshoeing. After his talk, a graduate student came up to him and said, “You have some provocative ideas, and I know who would be interested in hearing about them.”