Temple Grandin

by Anita Lesko

  I think I’d be afraid to go over Temple’s place! Laughing to herself even more, Temple shared, “I loved to do other mischievous things, like rig up a box over a door filled with confetti. When someone came to the door, it would turn upside down and dump all the confetti all over them. These are the kinds of things I did, I was twelve and under. I was creatively naughty!” How did Temple dream these things up?

  “Another great memory I have of our neighborhood was rooting for the Harvard and Yale football games. My dad went to Harvard, so we were Harvard fans. Our next-door neighbors were Yale fans. One time, they decorated the entire neighborhood in bright blue crepe paper, but it rained, and all the blue dye went all over the neighborhood’s front porches and fences! Thankfully, I didn’t do that—but I did learn from it. One time we decorated for Harvard, and used pink toilet paper because we knew it wouldn’t stain. I used that pink toilet paper to decorate the neighbor’s house, too. Then I made up a bumper sticker, went into the neighbor’s house, and stuck it on the front of their car so they wouldn’t see it when they came into the garage. They drove to church with the bumper sticker that said, ‘We’re Harvard Fans!’ Those neighbors pulled pranks on us, too, of course. At election time, they came over and put all kinds of Nixon stickers all over our car, inside and out.”

  Horse Activities

  Can you picture this in your mind? “When I was in elementary school, around third or fourth grade, we’d play horse. Because I was big and strong, I’d be the horse and the other kids got to ride me! I never got to ride them because they weren’t big enough. At our house we had a green rug, so that was the pasture, the other house had a brown rug, so that was the corral. We made bits out of pencils, and used string for the reins. Then you’d put the pencil in your mouth, with the string coming from both sides.”

  Let’s fast-forward a little to high school, where Temple thought of good times with her roommate. “When I was in high school, my roommate and I had plastic horses. We didn’t play with them, we decorated them! I made bridles for them, and fancy western parade outfits. I’d use black shoelaces to make the bridle and breastplate. Then, I’d get silver foil from a cigarette box to make the tiny silver trimmings. We’d spend endless hours making beautiful western parade outfits for them, and then display them. Then, the grandkids of the headmaster got to play with them, and it was a great honor for those grandkids to come and play with our horses. When I graduated, I gave the horses to those kids. One of the horses got a broken leg, so I made a prosthetic leg for it and carefully painted it to match the rest of the horse. We made Arabian outfits, parade outfits, and just had a great time doing that together!” Temple was developing her skills at interpersonal relations way back then.

  The Flying Saucer Hoax

  Temple went on to recall more antics. “I can remember the crazy flying saucer hoax I pulled off when I was in high school. I had my whole school believing it. I made a classic fifties-style flying saucer, about eighteen inches across and round, out of two pieces of cardboard. It had a dome on top that I used a clear Dairy Queen bowl to make, and I put a light in it so the dome lit up. I then went up on the roof of the far end of the girls’ building. Just as soon as they turned out their lights, I swung it back and forth in front of their window. The first time they didn’t see it, but I swung it past their window again, and that time they screamed! Then I ran back down to my room, and then I heard them all talking about the flying saucer they just saw, to which I kept saying, ‘That’s nonsense, that’s nonsense.’ The weird thing was that a couple weeks later there was a UFO sighting that was written up in the newspaper! The girls were convinced that what they saw out their window that night was the same UFO. It wasn’t until a few years later at graduation that I went up to the two girls that saw my flying saucer and handed it to them, stating, ‘This is what you saw out your window two years ago that night.’”

  Laughing, I said, “Oh, I’m sure they were pretty shocked!”

  “Here’s another one from high school,” Temple recalled. “There were a bunch of girls that liked stealing my candy. So, I got those little licorice logs that were wrapped, unwrapped them, filled them with shampoo, and rewrapped them.” Temple was now giggling rather uncontrollably. “Yeah, these girls would come in my room and take stuff. Once I took my sandwich cookies, took them apart, and replaced the white cream filling with toothpaste! Nothing dangerous, just make it so the cookies wouldn’t taste too good. Eventually, those kids stopped taking stuff from me.”

  I’m just picturing those girls biting into all that stuff!

  “As an adult, I’ll still do funny things,” she told me. “When I was on a plane, I watched some gross movie about a giant snake in a big fancy ballroom, and I’d start laughing so hard and loud that people were turning around looking at me.” I’m sure those sitting nearby weren’t very pleased at that! “I think the silliest things, like that, are really funny. My taste in movies ranges from action, to science fiction, to really serious.”

  Favorite Movies

  Before continuing with Temple’s antics, I’d like to take this opportunity to share with you her favorite movies. It’s quite fascinating.

  I asked Temple, “Which other movies do you like?” Temple had just returned home, where she watched a movie along the way. “Well, I just watched the third Planet of the Apes on a plane. I like the one where the ape was in the research lab, where the apes became partly human and were living in the woods, and the airline pilot with a bloody nose spread the virus all around the world that’s going to wipe out a lot of people. I actually like that one better than the one I saw on the plane today. Oh! There was another movie I just loved: The Martian. I read the book first, and I really enjoyed them both.”

  “Another movie I thought was fantastic was Hidden Figures. That was just fantastic! It was about the women that did all the hand-calculations for the orbits of the Mercury and Gemini programs, and John Glenn’s first orbital flight. It was all hand-calculated, and they were really discriminated against. One of the things I liked about Katherine Johnson, the woman portrayed in Hidden Figures, is that math came first. It was all about math. I can really relate to the scene where they weren’t going to let a woman into the planning project meeting. That was a great movie.”

  Temple continued, “The thing is, I’ve always been a NASA fan, but back in the sixties and seventies no one knew they existed. They were doing all those calculations, and I never knew about it until the movie came out. When I recently got inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame, the press asked me who I would recommend, and I said Katherine Johnson. She was the head of the Hidden Figures women. She deserved to be in the Women’s Hall of Fame. They never got any credit for any of that. Finally, Obama gave them the recognition they deserved. But for all those years, the Mercury and Gemini sub-orbital flights were done with hand-calculations. Then, when John Glenn went into space, these women had to figure out how to program the IBM 360 with punch cards. However, John Glenn didn’t trust the IBM 360, so he wanted Katherine Johnson and the others to re-do the calculations. On the first orbital flight, the calculations are very critical. You have this capsule going around the earth, and if you re-enter too steeply, you burn up. If you re-enter too shallowly, you’d skip off the outer surface of the atmosphere and bounce into outer space. So, the angle had to be calculated perfectly. I really liked that movie, it was better than the book.”

  “Wow,” I said, “I’ve got to get this movie. I never knew any of this, either, until now.”

  Temple has more favorites. “I really loved Avatar … of course, way back when, there were movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey. I loved 2001: A Space Odyssey.” I asked her if she liked Apollo 13. “Yes!” she responded excitedly, “In fact, I learned when I went to Cape Kennedy that Apollo 13 is actually used in training because it’s done so well. They had to figure out how to deal with emergencies. Those movies I really loved!”

  Now that you know, we shall return to the crazy, funny stories!
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  We Ship Anything, Anywhere!

  Here comes Temple’s zany side again! I knew it was going to be a piece of work by the way she started giggling. “Here’s something really funny,” she began. “I laughed so hard about this that I got a coughing fit. Brad Masella (who works for Future Horizons) and I were once driving along on a highway, and there was a truck in front of us that said, ‘We ship anything, anywhere!’ I said, ‘Do you want to bet? I’ll give you a load you’ll never ship, ever! I’d make up a box inside a box, big enough to fit on a pallet, and I’d fill it with pig guts packed in a frozen ice box! I’d load it so it would look normal. But then as they’d get half way across the country, it would be hot—I could just see them at some weigh station!’” She laughed to herself. “By then the ice would have melted, with the liquid dripping out of the box and out of their trailer! The smell would be horrible, and then they’d open the box and the pig guts would spill out all over! We have a weigh station here in Fort Collins. I was just picturing the liquid dripping out of the truck!” Temple was laughing so hard at this vision she had created in her mind. I had it envisioned in my mind, too, and I got a bit queasy.

  Experience in the Hospital

  I wish I were a fly on the wall for this. Temple told me, “In the early nineties, I had to have surgery. I can remember walking down to the nurses’ station and talking with them about all kinds of weird things, it was a lot of fun. I was telling them stories about slaughter houses, and they told me this story about this one prisoner who came there all the time. He had a colostomy, and he’d put ketchup in the colostomy bag, so it looked like he was bleeding, and get trips to the hospital!”

  “I did okay as a patient, I woke up right away after surgery. The other patient in my room puked all night, and she had these plastic things on her legs that inflated, so I heard ‘pssssttt’ (an imitation of the noise) on-and-off all night. I had to keep pressing the nurses call button each time the patient next to me started vomiting again. Then they woke me up at six in the morning to take a blood test. I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding! I didn’t get any sleep.’ Luckily, I have a pretty high tolerance for pain; I only took some pain medication for the first day, then I was just careful not to stand too long. I got three book chapters written in that time.”

  “Then, a week after my surgery, I went over to the meat plant. We were just supposed to meet in the shop. Once there, the guys wanted to go out into the plant, and they started climbing over gates! I said, ‘Wait a minute, I just had major surgery! I can’t climb over a gate!’ Ten days after my surgery, I made a trip to Cincinnati. I took the tiniest bag I had, just over my shoulder, so I didn’t have to lift anything heavy. I had a big incision. I also remember once when I had surgery back in the seventies, by the time I woke up from the surgery I had missed dinner, and I was really mad. Finally, the nurses brought me some of their private stash. I told them I was going to order a pizza!”

  Whew! Temple must be filled with batteries; she just keeps on going!

  Shingle-Throwing Contests

  I call this one “dangerous kid stuff.” Have you ever done this? I can’t say I have. This was when Temple was in boarding school. “Some of the most fun adventures we had were in the summer. I can remember roofing the horse barn at school. I thought that was a lot of fun, shingling the roof. We had no fall protection. Things were different back in the sixties. There were other students who were doing it, too. They were all boys. We had a lot of fun throwing shingles! We’d cut off edges to make them fit, then get the leftover pieces and throw them like frisbees while we were on the roof. One day while we were up on the roof, there was a partial eclipse. That was a real experience! We all knew it was coming. Not much work got done during that time. It was interesting to see how it got partially darkened. Everyone told us not to look at it, but we did quick glances just to see it.”

  Regarding nature, she went on, “When I was in Hawaii about fifteen years ago, I got to see a volcano erupt! I watched the lava flow down all the way to the road, where it just stopped. The lava was about eighteen inches thick. It was very impressive to see that, and to walk on it. The road just disappeared under the lava.”

  Temple is a weather buff, just like me. She said, “I love to watch storms; I like to watch The Weather Channel, and see all kinds of storms. Sometimes I can’t believe those crazy people who chase them.” I replied, “Me, too! Have you ever seen the show where you ride in the cockpit of the hurricane hunter plane and fly through the eyewall?” She replied, “Yes! I love watching that, too!”

  Endless Science Questions to Engineering Grandfather

  “When I was a child, we had a great telescope at my grandfather’s house. You could see down to the harbor, and see people on boats having parties. You could see them drinking, doing everything! I did that a lot. Indeed, I was a mischievous child!” I’m wondering: just what was she watching?

  Temple’s voice changed a bit when she mentioned her grandfather, who was an engineer. I asked her, “It sounds like you enjoyed being with your grandfather. Were there any other fun memories you have of him?” When she responded, I could tell those were some very happy memories for her. It made me smile just picturing a young Temple sitting there with her inquisitive mind, presenting him with one question after another. Even as a child, her thirst for knowledge was unquenchable.

  “Oh yes, Sundays with Grandfather. We’d go into the study, and he’d be smoking his pipe, and all his Scientific American journals were in there. All the rest of the family would be in the living room, except for Grandfather and me. I’d just be asking him one question after another. You know, why is the sky blue, why is the grass green? Why do the tides come in and out? We’d go to the beach a lot, so I’d see the tides go in and out. He’d explain it in great detail, how the moon goes around and pulls on the water … the gravitational pull on the water which controls the tide.”

  She went on, remembering more details. “Oh, yes! There were the locks and channel, and the tide gates. We’d go to our summer house that was on a harbor, and it was all closed in except for where there was a bridge with tide gates in it. When the tide would start to go out, the doors would close and keep the water in the small lagoon so it wouldn’t be all nasty mud, and just stay nice all the time. They kind of looked like locks in a canal. When the tide came in the gates would open, then when it went out they’d shut. They were set up in the shape of a “V”, big heavy wooden things. Grandfather and I would walk out there and look at them, trying to be there when the tide turned, and he’d explain how they worked.”

  “This was my grandfather from Mother’s side. He’s the one who co-invented the autopilot. We’d stand on the bridge, see, and the tide gates were underneath the bridge.” I interrupted Temple for a moment: “I can see where you got your scientific mind from!” Continuing, Temple said, “Yes! Grandfather and I would be in that study talking about science, while everyone else was in the living room. We visited maybe five times a year, but when we did go, it was on a Sunday. I was in elementary school at that time, in third or fourth grade. I remember looking at a power plant belching out black smoke. I wasn’t with grandfather then, we were having a family picnic. I said to my mother, won’t that make the atmosphere dirty? I might have been around eight or nine, I was little. I watched that black smoke going into the sky, and I had learned in class about the atmosphere. If you take the Earth as an apple, the atmosphere is only as thick as the skin. So, I got to thinking that the black smoke would dirty up the atmosphere. Mother then said that it just goes into the sky and disappears. So, it turns out I was right.”

  Always Being Observant

  I stated, “You are always very observant of everything going on around you, things that others don’t notice.”

  Temple shared with me the day of the solar eclipse, where she was walking along at Colorado State University. It was time for the eclipse to occur. As she walked along, she was looking down on the sidewalk. Suddenly, she saw hundreds of shadows on the sid
ewalk of the eclipse, which she realized were coming from between the leaves on the tree. The tree leaves were acting like multiple pin-hole cameras. She stopped to take photos of it, as others simply walked right on by and didn’t see it all. She went on, “And of course, the eclipse shadows on the sidewalk at Colorado State University, no one else noticed. I’ve been showing the slide of that, just the other day to an audience of six hundred people, and only about ten knew what the shadows were on the sidewalk. Then I looked it up online, and found there’s all kinds of eclipse shadows from the image coming between the leaves.”

  Special, Good Times at Family Gatherings

  Continuing on the subject of her grandparents, she went on to talk about Sunday dinners at Granny’s house. I know you are loving these stories as much as I am.

  Temple recalled these special moments. “I’ll tell you about Sunday dinner at Granny’s house, where you had to display good manners and were only allowed to tell a story twice. That’s right, manners were very important, and mother would tell me when it was someone else’s turn to talk. It was the same at aunt Bella’s, who was my father’s sister. She had a big long hallway in her house, and she had a mirror at the end of the hall. So, after lunch, I’d run down the hall and watch as I’d get bigger in the mirror the closer I got to it. Then when we went to Granny’s, she lived on the fifth floor, so I’d play ‘beat the elevator.’ I could run up five flights of stairs faster than the elevator could get up there! I was allowed to race the elevator when we came in and when we went out, but I wasn’t allowed to do it all day because banging up and down the stairs would bother too many people. That was a way I could blow off steam, all that running. I really loved running down that hall and watching myself get bigger in the mirror. And I always beat the elevator.” I’m thinking that Temple could have made it to the Olympics for running.