April 14, 2022 • 35 mins
Born in 1933, Donald T. of Forest, Mississippi exhibits strange behaviors that neither his parents, Beamon and Mary, nor doctors can understand. It’s the Eugenics era, when people who are different are considered degenerates, imbeciles, and threats to society best kept locked away in institutions. Beamon and Mary have other ideas.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M any. Imagine you're at the Kansas State Fair in
the nineteen twenties. Much of what you would see there
would look familiar today. There's cooking competitions and kids running
(00:22):
around the fairgrounds, and when night comes, maybe a big
fireworks display. Farm families are arriving from all over the
place to ride on the rides, watch the races, and
of course to show off their livestole. But starting in
there's another ferrament, which in today's perspective really seems hard
(00:44):
to believe. Along with the pigs and cows competing for ribbons,
there are entire human families being judged. Urine is tested
ever broken, any bones, skulls are measured, how often do
you bathe? The jewel teeth are evaluated open please. Judges
ask questions about childhood diseases. Mothers are giving the judges
(01:08):
a list of the meals they give their kids every day.
Every family member is observed chewing food, and the judges
are there taking notes down on all of this. There's
a written i Q test for children and parents, and
for good measure, a syphilis test. Rounds out the experience.
(01:28):
This whole thing. It's called a Fitter Family Contest and
they have a really specific social purpose for the nine twenties.
They're designed to get across a message to the masses
that human genetics determines all that is good and evil
about modern American society. Put simply, some people shouldn't reproduce,
(01:52):
some people should never be born. And in this podcast,
we're gonna be talking about one family from Mrs Hippy
who if they had gone before those judges back in
that era, they would have been judged defective or low grade,
which were terms actually used in those days, and therefore
they would have been deemed unworthy of breeding. That's because
(02:15):
they had a little boy named Donald who was exhibiting
certain unexpected and inexplicable behaviors. He was different. But the
determination of Donald's mom and dad to make sense of
his differences and their certainty that he deserved a place
in this world, well, it will change not only Donald's life,
(02:36):
but all of our lives. For I Heeart Podcasts, I'm
John don Van and I'm Karen Zucker. This is Autism's
first Child and I heart original podcast and this is
episode one Fitter Families. Twenty years ago, my journalism career
(02:58):
took an unexpected turn at the time, I was working
as a general assignment reporter at ABC News, and I
had spent years covering wars and famine and political upheaval.
ABC's John don Van begins our series with the analysis
what we saw in last night's presidential debate with John Donvan,
ABC eight point nine Magnitude Epicenter of fifteen miles below ground.
(03:21):
One of my colleagues, a producer I worked with a lot,
learned that her two year old son, Mickey, had autism.
Here's Karen, So. My son, Mickey was in the Special
Tiddler program at Barnard College, where kids from eighteen to
thirty six months went to school. The very first day
we went, my husband and I were sitting in this
(03:42):
two way mirror and there are twelve or thirteen kids,
you know, they're all playing, and all of a sudden,
the teachers said, everybody go sit down and get some
juice and crackers. So eleven of those kids went down
and sat at the table to get their juicing crackers,
and there was Mickey in the corner with his shoes
and off dancing to the music. As soon as you
(04:02):
saw him with other children, educators who knew autism could
tell that he was different. We thought he was different
because he was reading in one and a half and
we knew we went to a different drummer, but we
just sort of thought he was brilliant. We didn't know
how different he was, and they suggested he get evaluated,
(04:23):
and six weeks later he was diagnosed with autism. Mickey's
diagnosis turned Karen's life completely upside down. Before that, you know,
she was one of the networks up and coming producers, definitely,
and she was we thought bound to be one of
the people the rest of us would end up working
for it the network. Well not quite. But the very
(04:44):
first interview I ever did as a journalist was with
Rosa Parks. So in the early days, I thought I
was off to a good start. I covered politics, I
went overseas to help cover the go for the Barcelona Olympics.
It was a good run. So it was a shock
to everybody out of nowhere, this incredible journalist that you
were known to be. Karen, you know, just stepped off
(05:05):
the fast track. You went from working full time to
working part time. Yeah, my boss had offered me a
job share because he didn't want to lose me, and
he knew that I'd give a hundred. And I was
really really fortunate because I was able to keep my
hand in the news business. And I was even more
fortunate because I was able to use the skill of
(05:27):
journalism as a way to figure out what to do
for Mickey and to educate others about autism and share
it with the world, because at this time, when people
heard the word autism, everybody still thought one thing, and
that was rain Man. He's particular case. He's pretty well off.
He's very high functionate. Most autistics they can't speak and
(05:47):
they can't communicate, right, Yeah, do you know what autistic is? Yeah?
You know that were Yeah? Are you autistic? I don't
think so. No. Not getting a network to agree to
do a half an hour on a topic that honestly,
most people still have never heard of in the um
(06:09):
that took a lot of uh, let's say, push, and
Karen is a bulldog. She pushed and she convinced Nightline
to let us do it. We were the first team
in network news to make reporting about autism into an
actual beat. Those first autism stories that we did together
put me into a more intimate kind of connection with
(06:32):
the people I was reporting on that I was actually
used to. You know, you can do war reporting in
this kind of big picture way, and most of the
time that's how it happens. You're telling this story of
a whole city under siege or a whole army of soldiers.
But this reporting on autism was always very close up
(06:53):
and very intimate and focused on individuals and their families,
and it was very internal. It was about the feelings
of people on the spectrum and their parents who often
when their kids were first diagnosed, were confused and frightened
and having to adjust to this new normal for their kids.
I had some experience with autism, my brother in law
(07:15):
has autism, but it didn't prepare me for this kind
of reporting. That first story, Karen and I told we
did it very honestly and it had a big impact
in the autism community. And after that, Karen asked me
to do another story, and then another, and we created
this series called Still Unexplained Wave of Autism that began
(07:40):
in the US in the ninety nine with an estimated
five hundred thousand kids in the US with autism. Today,
there are we reported on girls with autism, adults with autism, siblings,
how kids with autism, or bully. So we've been covering
autism together for television for seven years, and now seven
years in we're hard at work on a book about
(08:02):
the history of the diagnosis, and the research for that
brought us into close contact with the work of a
doctor named Leo Connor, a child psychiatrist, and we're going
to get deeper into Connor's life in our next episode.
But in three Dr Connor published a landmark paper that
described a neurological disorder that, as he put it, had
(08:22):
not previously been described. He called it autistic disturbances of
effective contact. And in that article he defined what we
all today recognized as autism. And he included case studies
of eleven children, and here's how he described their symptoms.
The disinterest in people, the obsession with objects, the deep
(08:43):
need for sameness and routine, the detachment and inaccessibility to
other us. Connor also made observations at his clinic at
Johns Hopkins of these kids directly. But from the beginning,
Karen and I were drawn to the first case described
in this study, literally called case one, Donald, last name
(09:03):
initial T, Donald T. We started to wonder if he
was still alive. Meeting Donald would be meeting history. In
his case studying on Donald T, Connor mentions a birthdate
September eight. I turned up a speech that Connor gave
one where he mentions that Donald lives in a little
(09:25):
town in Mississippi called Forest. First name, last, initial birthday location.
That's more than enough to track a person down. So
we did some sleuthing and came up with what we
thought was going to be Donald's phone number, and Karen
is the one who dialed in an answering machine picked out.
(09:48):
Once I heard the message, I knew it was him.
I called John and said I found him. I found
Donald T. After the break will investigate a wildly popular
turn of the century scientific blue to breed better humans,
and how that science led to the institutionalization, sterilization, even
the euthanasia of scores of children like Donald. Our quest
(10:26):
to understand autisms case number one, and what his life
was like and what the world that he grew up
and was like it actually begins well before Donald T
is born. I don't think people are that familiar with
the fact that from really the early nineteen hundreds up
until the beginning of World War two, essentially jendaics was
really a big movement to the United States swept the country.
(10:47):
As here's Adam Cohen, eugenics historian, author of the book Imbeciles.
It was an euro of science and it was a
progressive Here also, humans emerged from this evolutionary process. What
if we tried to take a more active role in it.
What if he tried to focus on good genes and
do that to make better people, sort of like farmers
(11:07):
have been doing for millennia by trying to breed better cattle.
Even before those Fitter Family contests started popping up at
state fairs, there was something called the Better Babies movement
that got a hold on American culture around the turn
of the twentieth century. Better Babies kicks off with the
contest at the Louisiana State Fair. In night. Tourists are
(11:32):
filing through an exhibition hall and watching as nurses and
white gowns and cardboard caps weigh and measure and inspect
these little, tiny babies, and the baby judged to be
the healthiest and the strongest and the most scientifically raised,
that baby is awarded a silver trophy. There was oddly
some very positive intent behind it, right. I mean, this
(11:54):
was the time when medical education wasn't widespread, particularly in
rural areas. People didn't have the information now have about
baby Herring. Doctor's Fox book hadn't been written yet, there
wasn't Google to search you know, what to do when babies,
cology and things like that. So some of this is informational.
It's trying to help people with a difficult thing of
raising a child and a roll with information. But because
(12:16):
of the Women's Home Companion, which was a really popular magazine,
coops this whole idea and forms the Better Babies Bureau
and practically no time you can find a Better Baby event.
In forty states, thousands of bombs enter their children. There's
something really fun about it. It's like the ultimate soap
(12:37):
bucks derby. Winning comes with incredible bragging rights. In Iowa,
the contests are run by a woman named Mary T. Watts,
matronly present, snowy white hair pulled back in a bun
rigid posture. She's perpetually draped in these long pearls that
swing to her waist. Shortly after starting Better Babies i
(13:00):
a chapter Watch receives a postcard signed by a man
named Charles Davenport, who tells her she is missing one
important measurement. You should give fifty to hereditary before you
begin to score a baby. Watch doesn't know it just yet,
but in the field of eugenics, Davenport is a serious player.
(13:21):
Wats forgets all about the postcard until the following year,
when Davenport sends another note a prize winner at two,
maybe an epileptic at ten, And now Watch is convinced.
She decides to insert heredity tests into the contests forget
better babies. Now it's fitter Families. It takes six years
(13:42):
for Wats to get the fitter Famili's concept off the ground.
Experts doubt that any educated, self respecting adult will submit
willingly to physical exams at a county fair. Who on
earth would be open to the syphilis test. There was
really many attempts to bring the high flutent ideas of
(14:02):
eugenics to the people. Measure people's skulls to see like
how large they were and how big the brain would be.
So they're doing that kind of quote scientific work. The
first Fitter Families for Fireside Chats competition is held in
a Kansas agricultural fair. Twenty families compete. Early competitions are
(14:23):
such a success that Watts takes the show on the road.
The contests are always time to overlap with the main event,
the livestock contests. Farmers truck in their best looking cattle,
and there are most perfect pigs to compete for the
blue ribbons. Better bred animals, when crossed again and again,
lead to unending improvement in the stock of the breed.
(14:47):
Mrs Watts has the same goal for humans. While the
judges are testing the Holstein's jerseys and white faces, we
are testing the Joneses, Smith's and the Johnson's. When Mrs
Watts found a winner like the Kelly family of Isle
of Hope, Georgia, which she referred to as being of
the highest type, she meant that the Kelly's were the
(15:07):
sort of Americans who should be encouraged, exhorted even to reproduce. Meantime,
all the information that we collect on your family is
going to be stored at the Eugenics Record Office in
cold Spring Harbor. That's Dr Laura Lovett, historian, professor and author,
and it's going to allow for a kind of what
(15:30):
they imagined would be a control of the entire population
around genetic predispositions. This was actually quite widespread In the
nineteen tens and nine twenties, The New York Times ran
a favorable feature about the Eugenics Record Office and how
people could take eugenics into account in deciding who to marry.
(15:52):
Back at the state fair, a sign at the competition
booth carries an urgent warning every forty eight seconds of
person is born in the United States who will never
grow up mentally beyond that stage of a normal eight
year old boy or girl. A second sign adds perspective
every fifteen seconds, a hundred dollars if your money goes
(16:13):
for the care of persons with bad heredits, such as
the insane, a feeble mind, criminals, and other defectives. And
the third sign offers hope. Every seven and a half minutes,
a high grade person is born. Good heredity is falling
behind at an alarming rate. They warn small town newspaper
(16:34):
editors decide the fittest families make for great copy, and
they spread the word about eugenics. Now in the broader
eugenics movement, Mrs Watts is really just a bit player.
She's not a scientist, she's not an academic, she's not
a statesman. Her operation really is the extreme retail end
of eugenics, a scientific, political, and philosophical movement that dedicated
(16:57):
itself as one adherent put it to iron up the
springs that feed the torrent of defective and degenerate protoplasm.
But scientists, academics, and statesman are well represented in the
eugenics movement at Harvard and at Yale, in the pages
of Scientific American, and in the New York Times. Powerful
people like Alexander Graham Bell embraced this brand new so
(17:20):
called science, and John D. Rockefeller eugenic starts to creep
into public schools. President Teddy Roosevelt is a big fan
of this book, called the Passing of the Great Race,
a rigid system of selection through the elimination of those
who are a weak or unfit. In other words, social
failures would solve the whole question in one hundred years.
(17:46):
The book's author is a man named Madison Grant, who
is widely respected at the time. He's the founder of
the American Museum of Natural History. He's a really major
conservationist and a very high ranking member of polite New
York Society. He gets a lot of fan letters from
all over the place. One of them came from Austria,
(18:07):
from a young man who wrote to Grant that the
book is now his Bible. This young Austrian man's name
Half Help. And we know what the Nazis did with
these ideas. They set up the Rice Committee for the
Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses. It sounds
(18:29):
very bureaucratic, but it's basically a child killing organization. Under
this program, children three and under with any number of
congenital disorders are condemned to be euthanized. Years before the Nazis,
(18:51):
eugenics had crept into American society in some very dark ways.
There are already institutions across the country where epileptic and
the intellectually disabled or kept separated from society. But now
more than half the states began to allow forced sterilization
of these individuals. Here's Dr Lovett. Often in those asylums
(19:15):
where sterilization, without any any information, any conversation takes place,
and those depend on the states. Indiana is one of
the first ones to introduce the sterilization law. Eight is
going to focus predominantly on mail inmates. California, for example,
and part of this has to do with that First
(19:37):
World War decides that, in fact, it's going to sterilize
as many women as men, and it sterilizes women who
wind up in what we're called feeble minded institutions. A
false assumption has now taken hold that there's a meaningful
relationship between somebody's i Q and that person's ability to
(19:57):
be a contributing and law abid fighting and moral member
of society. Lower i Q was thought to define an
undesirable sort of person, and so they imagine then that
the way to prevent further reproduction of lower i Q
(20:19):
or people minded individuals was to sterilize them. And so California,
for example, winds up sterilizing as many women as men
were as in Indiana. Partics predominant emails in Margaret Sanger
tells a Vasster College audience, this is the founder of
planned parenthood, right right, This is what she tells an
(20:39):
audience of young women. The American public is taxed, heavily
taxed to maintain an increasing race of morons, which threatens
the very foundations of our civilization. The very next year,
the United States Supreme Court, here's a case called Buck
versus Bell addressing the constitutionality of Virginia's eugenical Sterilization Act.
(21:01):
Carrie Books story could be a podcast all its own.
The state decides to sterilize Carrie Buck, even though there's
nothing wrong with her. She doesn't suffer from any sort
of malady. She's just a poor teenage mother with a
sixth grade education. Eugenics depends heavily on i Q tests.
Carrie Buck is classified as quote middle grade moron, a
(21:25):
technical classification that they actually used based on the intelligence scale,
but still put her above the levels of idiot and imbecile,
which were also terms that they actually used. Morons again,
that's how Carrie was rated. Are considered dangerous people. They're
smart enough to pass undetected and even to breed with
their so called superiors. Carrie, who is an unmarried teenager,
(21:48):
has a child, which to the experts back then, indicated
heightened sexuality and fertility, both said to be common among
the so called mentally deficient. It was really a nightmare
tangle of measurements, classifications, assumptions, and prejudices. The Supreme Court
rules eight to one that the statute doesn't violate the
(22:11):
due process cause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This decision clears
the way for the forced sterilization of some seventy thousand Americans.
Some people want to go beyond for sterilizations. They want
to actually euthanize intellectually disabled children. That means kill them.
(22:31):
It's an idea that's actually proposed in the American Journal
of Psychiatry by a neurologist named Robert Foster Kennedy July.
Kennedy argues that death is sometimes the most appropriate prescription
for children he called nature's mistakes. This defective child has
no future nor hope of one, then it is a
(22:53):
merciful and kindly thing to relieve that defective often tortured
and convulse, gro task and observed useless and fullish and
entirely undesirable of the agony of living. Basically execute them.
Shocking right, not to everybody. Back then the previous year,
(23:13):
in a poll of thousands of doctors in New York,
of the respondents said they favored legalizing euthanasia for severely
disabled kids. And back in ninety three, this was the
world that Donald T was born into. When we returned
Mary and Beamon triplet wrestle with the scientific communities insistence
(23:37):
that the best course of action is locking their baby
boy away forever. H grandfather mccravy j R. McCravey was
born in Titan County, Mississippi, in eighteen sixty six, and
he grew up on a farm in really abject power,
(24:00):
but had a mind for banking. That's Donald Triplet's brother Oliver.
Their family founded and are still part owners of the
Bank of Forest. Their mother, Mary had a college degree,
which was very rare for a woman in the middle
of Mississippi in that time. She married the former mayor's son,
Oliver Beamon Triplet Jr. Known to most people as Mr Beamon.
(24:23):
Beamon had a degree from Yale Law School, also rare
for the middle of Mississippi, and he practiced law and Forest.
My father was interested in law early on, and when
he graduated from il SAPs in the early twenties, the
state had lost its accreditation and he had a cousin
(24:44):
that lived in Valdosta, Georgia that had connections with the
University of Florida. He got him and rolled down there
in the law school and he went for two years,
but decided he wanted a more prestigious law degree and
opted to go to Yale, and so he went to
New Haven as a one year wonder and he told me, said,
(25:06):
the professor's up there. You know. Su A resented the
fact I was going up there, but he said I
was very diligent and graduated with honors. So as as
how at all came down. In three, Mary gave birth
to Donald. When Donald was three, his parents brought him
(25:30):
to Sanatorium, Mississippi, to a facility known as the preventorium.
But he wouldn't be making the return trip. Now that's
kind of a strange word, preventorium, but there actually used
to be a lot of them around the country. Children,
especially poor children, were thought to be at high risk
of tuberculosis, and doctors would send kids away to these
(25:53):
places called preventoriums to keep them safe by keeping them
out of society where the germs were. But Donald wasn't
really at risk of catching TV. That's not why he
was sent away. It was because he was different. And
this was a thing that sometimes wealthy families dead. It
was a way to institutionalize a child without having to
(26:16):
connect it to any sort of mental condition. It was
a way to dodge the stigma. And perhaps for that reason,
or perhaps they just didn't know what else to do.
That's what Donald's parents did in seven, and we wondered
what would the separation have been like for Donald's parents
to go through. Oh I, it was extremely difficult, John,
(26:38):
you could imagine, I mean this, this was her firstborn child.
Here's another member of the Triplet family. My name is
Obe Triplet, and Don is my uncle. Maman Triplet was
Don's father, and my granddad. He was a lawyer here
in town and settled here and wound up Mary and
my grandmother, her name was Mary mccrayev and Don was
(27:01):
born and everything's good, and then things started, you know, changing.
She realized that something wouldn't quite right. There's the way
you know, a picture of this. Of course, the at
the time, autism wasn't even a word that I'm aware of.
I'm not an expert or anything, but nobody knew, you know,
about it or anything. He was under the impression that
perhaps he was insane. Donald was not insane, but the
(27:26):
state of psychiatry was stunning lee primitive back in the
nineteen thirties, especially child psychiatry. That's another topic we'll be
delving into more deeply in our next episode. There was
no one in the professional ranks who could make sense
of Donald's behaviors. I asked Donald's brother Oliver, what he
thought the early signs were that his mom had noticed
(27:48):
I was ready before my time, So I told you
My earliest memory of him wasn't forty three, but from
what I'm told in a secure hearsay, he he was
unrest positive. He didn't like to cook stuff like that.
That's nothing but hearsay. I went a round for that.
(28:09):
Donald never ran to his father when he came home
from work. He never pried for his mother. They often
felt he was looking right through them. But at the
same time, he had this attachment to objects. He especially
love to spin things, but if he was interrupted while
doing that or anything else, he would have intense tantrums.
(28:34):
It became clear that Donald was protecting something really important
to him, and that was sameness, pure, unadulterated predictability. The
triplets through everything they had at trying to find an
answer for their son. They had money, they had access
to the best technological tools of the day, a car
(28:55):
and a telephone. They got Donald seen by top docters,
but nobody had an explanation for Donald's differences. And along
the way we're guessing. His parents heard some terms that
were extremely painful to hear. Defective, demented, deranged, feeble minded.
(29:16):
And when kids got these kinds of labels, there were
so often the really depressing prescription for what should be done.
Put this child away. So when there are parents who
wanted simply to keep their child at home, to make
them part of their family, doctors said don't. So this
is the kind of message we think Donald's parents were getting.
(29:39):
Sending him away was not their idea, it was the doctor's.
In fact, a doctor told Mary she was part of
the problem. You have overstimulated him. And the doctor told
them to send Donald away. That's what they were told
to do. That's what that's what was expected for them
to do, that's what was accepted at that time. And
(29:59):
they went layer and got nnny. This preventatorium looked like
a Greek temple with huge white columns out on the
front porch. And one day Donald's parents brought him there
and walked him in between the columns and they checked
him in. Mary and Beamon Triplet watched the nurse take
three year old Donald's hand and lead him down the hall.
(30:22):
Then they turned away and left. I can't imagine. There
was much conversation on the drive back home. Being in
the preventatorium was not good for Donald. There had been
a light in his eyes before he got to this place.
He had been a noisy and active kid, and curious
(30:42):
and creative. But all of that went dead at the preventorium,
and almost all at once. We found a photograph of
Donald from this period where we never expected to. It
wasn't a report on the preventatorium wished in. On page
(31:02):
thirty three, there's Donald. He's sitting on the front steps
surrounded by a dozen other kids. The other kids are
clearly reacting to something they're they're smiling, and they're giggling
like the photographer had just made a joke to get
them to laugh for the picture. But not Donald. He's
just staring at the camera, not looking happy at all.
(31:23):
And we underaged some medical notes on his time there,
and they said he basically went silent. He wasn't healthy
at all. The quote in the notes is that he
faded away physically and he sat motionless, not paying attention
to anything. All the things Donald used to like to
pick up and examine and spin, like blocks and books
(31:46):
and toy trucks, and pots and pans. He stopped reaching
for them or for anything. The examining doctor later concluded,
it seems that he had his worst phase. Donald's mom
and dad really missed their son, and they were not
giving up on helping him. Somehow. One day Beamon sat
down with his secretary, Katherine Robertson, and he started to
(32:09):
dictate a letter, which she typed up pages and pages
of its single space thirty three pages long of observations
of Donald's behaviors. In time, the words Beamon spoke and
that Ms. Robertson typed up would travel far and wide.
They would be quoted in scholarly research, discussed in university classrooms,
(32:29):
translated into multiple languages, words that still paint a vivid
portrait and helped to define the diagnosis that we call autism.
Simply put this letter, this cry for help. It opened
a door to a new way of understanding. Coming up
(32:52):
on Autism's first child, older Donald T. Sive years old,
Din was victim I cleaned from Forest, Mississippi, and made
me aware for the first time of the behavior pattern
noth neon to meet or anyone else debt to four.
(33:15):
Even though I was diagnosed at the age of eleven,
where autism didn't really mean anything at that point. Um,
I only knew that I was different and the different
was bad. You're cruel. Kids can be particularly young, right.
You don't keep secrets in small pounds, you know. I
think the combination of the bank of the respect that
his family had earned went a long way towards the
(33:39):
community realizing that here's this family with a great deal
of stature in the community who have a son that's
causing them a great deal of struggle. I think something
to be considered about Donald Triplet is that he's in
a homachiness space, which means that the family had means
and access and power. The framework for doing that. Some
(34:00):
diagnostic test itself is based on how white people understand
behavior and language. I'm John don Vent. I'm Karen Zucker.
Autism's First Child is a production of School of Humans
and I Heart Podcasts and based on our book and
documentary film in a Different Key. The podcast is produced
(34:21):
by Alexander Ritchie. Our story editors are Matt Riddle and
Alex French, senior staff writer at I Heart Originals. Original
score composed and mixed by Alice McCoy. Scoring mixing and
mastering by Ryan Peoples. Voiceovers by Zoe Wert, Michael Coscarelli,
David Perry, Christopher Paul Stelling, and Louis Carloso. The Rainman
(34:43):
clip courtesy of MGM Media Licensing Archival sound thanks to
Craig Smith at freesound dot org. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott,
Brandon Barr, Elsie Crowley and Jason English. Special thanks to
Ray Conley, Ernie Intra Doot and Will Pearson School of
(35:15):
Humans
M any. Imagine you're at the Kansas State Fair in
the nineteen twenties. Much of what you would see there
would look familiar today. There's cooking competitions and kids running
(00:22):
around the fairgrounds, and when night comes, maybe a big
fireworks display. Farm families are arriving from all over the
place to ride on the rides, watch the races, and
of course to show off their livestole. But starting in
there's another ferrament, which in today's perspective really seems hard
(00:44):
to believe. Along with the pigs and cows competing for ribbons,
there are entire human families being judged. Urine is tested
ever broken, any bones, skulls are measured, how often do
you bathe? The jewel teeth are evaluated open please. Judges
ask questions about childhood diseases. Mothers are giving the judges
(01:08):
a list of the meals they give their kids every day.
Every family member is observed chewing food, and the judges
are there taking notes down on all of this. There's
a written i Q test for children and parents, and
for good measure, a syphilis test. Rounds out the experience.
(01:28):
This whole thing. It's called a Fitter Family Contest and
they have a really specific social purpose for the nine twenties.
They're designed to get across a message to the masses
that human genetics determines all that is good and evil
about modern American society. Put simply, some people shouldn't reproduce,
(01:52):
some people should never be born. And in this podcast,
we're gonna be talking about one family from Mrs Hippy
who if they had gone before those judges back in
that era, they would have been judged defective or low grade,
which were terms actually used in those days, and therefore
they would have been deemed unworthy of breeding. That's because
(02:15):
they had a little boy named Donald who was exhibiting
certain unexpected and inexplicable behaviors. He was different. But the
determination of Donald's mom and dad to make sense of
his differences and their certainty that he deserved a place
in this world, well, it will change not only Donald's life,
(02:36):
but all of our lives. For I Heeart Podcasts, I'm
John don Van and I'm Karen Zucker. This is Autism's
first Child and I heart original podcast and this is
episode one Fitter Families. Twenty years ago, my journalism career
(02:58):
took an unexpected turn at the time, I was working
as a general assignment reporter at ABC News, and I
had spent years covering wars and famine and political upheaval.
ABC's John don Van begins our series with the analysis
what we saw in last night's presidential debate with John Donvan,
ABC eight point nine Magnitude Epicenter of fifteen miles below ground.
(03:21):
One of my colleagues, a producer I worked with a lot,
learned that her two year old son, Mickey, had autism.
Here's Karen, So. My son, Mickey was in the Special
Tiddler program at Barnard College, where kids from eighteen to
thirty six months went to school. The very first day
we went, my husband and I were sitting in this
(03:42):
two way mirror and there are twelve or thirteen kids,
you know, they're all playing, and all of a sudden,
the teachers said, everybody go sit down and get some
juice and crackers. So eleven of those kids went down
and sat at the table to get their juicing crackers,
and there was Mickey in the corner with his shoes
and off dancing to the music. As soon as you
(04:02):
saw him with other children, educators who knew autism could
tell that he was different. We thought he was different
because he was reading in one and a half and
we knew we went to a different drummer, but we
just sort of thought he was brilliant. We didn't know
how different he was, and they suggested he get evaluated,
(04:23):
and six weeks later he was diagnosed with autism. Mickey's
diagnosis turned Karen's life completely upside down. Before that, you know,
she was one of the networks up and coming producers, definitely,
and she was we thought bound to be one of
the people the rest of us would end up working
for it the network. Well not quite. But the very
(04:44):
first interview I ever did as a journalist was with
Rosa Parks. So in the early days, I thought I
was off to a good start. I covered politics, I
went overseas to help cover the go for the Barcelona Olympics.
It was a good run. So it was a shock
to everybody out of nowhere, this incredible journalist that you
were known to be. Karen, you know, just stepped off
(05:05):
the fast track. You went from working full time to
working part time. Yeah, my boss had offered me a
job share because he didn't want to lose me, and
he knew that I'd give a hundred. And I was
really really fortunate because I was able to keep my
hand in the news business. And I was even more
fortunate because I was able to use the skill of
(05:27):
journalism as a way to figure out what to do
for Mickey and to educate others about autism and share
it with the world, because at this time, when people
heard the word autism, everybody still thought one thing, and
that was rain Man. He's particular case. He's pretty well off.
He's very high functionate. Most autistics they can't speak and
(05:47):
they can't communicate, right, Yeah, do you know what autistic is? Yeah?
You know that were Yeah? Are you autistic? I don't
think so. No. Not getting a network to agree to
do a half an hour on a topic that honestly,
most people still have never heard of in the um
(06:09):
that took a lot of uh, let's say, push, and
Karen is a bulldog. She pushed and she convinced Nightline
to let us do it. We were the first team
in network news to make reporting about autism into an
actual beat. Those first autism stories that we did together
put me into a more intimate kind of connection with
(06:32):
the people I was reporting on that I was actually
used to. You know, you can do war reporting in
this kind of big picture way, and most of the
time that's how it happens. You're telling this story of
a whole city under siege or a whole army of soldiers.
But this reporting on autism was always very close up
(06:53):
and very intimate and focused on individuals and their families,
and it was very internal. It was about the feelings
of people on the spectrum and their parents who often
when their kids were first diagnosed, were confused and frightened
and having to adjust to this new normal for their kids.
I had some experience with autism, my brother in law
(07:15):
has autism, but it didn't prepare me for this kind
of reporting. That first story, Karen and I told we
did it very honestly and it had a big impact
in the autism community. And after that, Karen asked me
to do another story, and then another, and we created
this series called Still Unexplained Wave of Autism that began
(07:40):
in the US in the ninety nine with an estimated
five hundred thousand kids in the US with autism. Today,
there are we reported on girls with autism, adults with autism, siblings,
how kids with autism, or bully. So we've been covering
autism together for television for seven years, and now seven
years in we're hard at work on a book about
(08:02):
the history of the diagnosis, and the research for that
brought us into close contact with the work of a
doctor named Leo Connor, a child psychiatrist, and we're going
to get deeper into Connor's life in our next episode.
But in three Dr Connor published a landmark paper that
described a neurological disorder that, as he put it, had
(08:22):
not previously been described. He called it autistic disturbances of
effective contact. And in that article he defined what we
all today recognized as autism. And he included case studies
of eleven children, and here's how he described their symptoms.
The disinterest in people, the obsession with objects, the deep
(08:43):
need for sameness and routine, the detachment and inaccessibility to
other us. Connor also made observations at his clinic at
Johns Hopkins of these kids directly. But from the beginning,
Karen and I were drawn to the first case described
in this study, literally called case one, Donald, last name
(09:03):
initial T, Donald T. We started to wonder if he
was still alive. Meeting Donald would be meeting history. In
his case studying on Donald T, Connor mentions a birthdate
September eight. I turned up a speech that Connor gave
one where he mentions that Donald lives in a little
(09:25):
town in Mississippi called Forest. First name, last, initial birthday location.
That's more than enough to track a person down. So
we did some sleuthing and came up with what we
thought was going to be Donald's phone number, and Karen
is the one who dialed in an answering machine picked out.
(09:48):
Once I heard the message, I knew it was him.
I called John and said I found him. I found
Donald T. After the break will investigate a wildly popular
turn of the century scientific blue to breed better humans,
and how that science led to the institutionalization, sterilization, even
the euthanasia of scores of children like Donald. Our quest
(10:26):
to understand autisms case number one, and what his life
was like and what the world that he grew up
and was like it actually begins well before Donald T
is born. I don't think people are that familiar with
the fact that from really the early nineteen hundreds up
until the beginning of World War two, essentially jendaics was
really a big movement to the United States swept the country.
(10:47):
As here's Adam Cohen, eugenics historian, author of the book Imbeciles.
It was an euro of science and it was a
progressive Here also, humans emerged from this evolutionary process. What
if we tried to take a more active role in it.
What if he tried to focus on good genes and
do that to make better people, sort of like farmers
(11:07):
have been doing for millennia by trying to breed better cattle.
Even before those Fitter Family contests started popping up at
state fairs, there was something called the Better Babies movement
that got a hold on American culture around the turn
of the twentieth century. Better Babies kicks off with the
contest at the Louisiana State Fair. In night. Tourists are
(11:32):
filing through an exhibition hall and watching as nurses and
white gowns and cardboard caps weigh and measure and inspect
these little, tiny babies, and the baby judged to be
the healthiest and the strongest and the most scientifically raised,
that baby is awarded a silver trophy. There was oddly
some very positive intent behind it, right. I mean, this
(11:54):
was the time when medical education wasn't widespread, particularly in
rural areas. People didn't have the information now have about
baby Herring. Doctor's Fox book hadn't been written yet, there
wasn't Google to search you know, what to do when babies,
cology and things like that. So some of this is informational.
It's trying to help people with a difficult thing of
raising a child and a roll with information. But because
(12:16):
of the Women's Home Companion, which was a really popular magazine,
coops this whole idea and forms the Better Babies Bureau
and practically no time you can find a Better Baby event.
In forty states, thousands of bombs enter their children. There's
something really fun about it. It's like the ultimate soap
(12:37):
bucks derby. Winning comes with incredible bragging rights. In Iowa,
the contests are run by a woman named Mary T. Watts,
matronly present, snowy white hair pulled back in a bun
rigid posture. She's perpetually draped in these long pearls that
swing to her waist. Shortly after starting Better Babies i
(13:00):
a chapter Watch receives a postcard signed by a man
named Charles Davenport, who tells her she is missing one
important measurement. You should give fifty to hereditary before you
begin to score a baby. Watch doesn't know it just yet,
but in the field of eugenics, Davenport is a serious player.
(13:21):
Wats forgets all about the postcard until the following year,
when Davenport sends another note a prize winner at two,
maybe an epileptic at ten, And now Watch is convinced.
She decides to insert heredity tests into the contests forget
better babies. Now it's fitter Families. It takes six years
(13:42):
for Wats to get the fitter Famili's concept off the ground.
Experts doubt that any educated, self respecting adult will submit
willingly to physical exams at a county fair. Who on
earth would be open to the syphilis test. There was
really many attempts to bring the high flutent ideas of
(14:02):
eugenics to the people. Measure people's skulls to see like
how large they were and how big the brain would be.
So they're doing that kind of quote scientific work. The
first Fitter Families for Fireside Chats competition is held in
a Kansas agricultural fair. Twenty families compete. Early competitions are
(14:23):
such a success that Watts takes the show on the road.
The contests are always time to overlap with the main event,
the livestock contests. Farmers truck in their best looking cattle,
and there are most perfect pigs to compete for the
blue ribbons. Better bred animals, when crossed again and again,
lead to unending improvement in the stock of the breed.
(14:47):
Mrs Watts has the same goal for humans. While the
judges are testing the Holstein's jerseys and white faces, we
are testing the Joneses, Smith's and the Johnson's. When Mrs
Watts found a winner like the Kelly family of Isle
of Hope, Georgia, which she referred to as being of
the highest type, she meant that the Kelly's were the
(15:07):
sort of Americans who should be encouraged, exhorted even to reproduce. Meantime,
all the information that we collect on your family is
going to be stored at the Eugenics Record Office in
cold Spring Harbor. That's Dr Laura Lovett, historian, professor and author,
and it's going to allow for a kind of what
(15:30):
they imagined would be a control of the entire population
around genetic predispositions. This was actually quite widespread In the
nineteen tens and nine twenties, The New York Times ran
a favorable feature about the Eugenics Record Office and how
people could take eugenics into account in deciding who to marry.
(15:52):
Back at the state fair, a sign at the competition
booth carries an urgent warning every forty eight seconds of
person is born in the United States who will never
grow up mentally beyond that stage of a normal eight
year old boy or girl. A second sign adds perspective
every fifteen seconds, a hundred dollars if your money goes
(16:13):
for the care of persons with bad heredits, such as
the insane, a feeble mind, criminals, and other defectives. And
the third sign offers hope. Every seven and a half minutes,
a high grade person is born. Good heredity is falling
behind at an alarming rate. They warn small town newspaper
(16:34):
editors decide the fittest families make for great copy, and
they spread the word about eugenics. Now in the broader
eugenics movement, Mrs Watts is really just a bit player.
She's not a scientist, she's not an academic, she's not
a statesman. Her operation really is the extreme retail end
of eugenics, a scientific, political, and philosophical movement that dedicated
(16:57):
itself as one adherent put it to iron up the
springs that feed the torrent of defective and degenerate protoplasm.
But scientists, academics, and statesman are well represented in the
eugenics movement at Harvard and at Yale, in the pages
of Scientific American, and in the New York Times. Powerful
people like Alexander Graham Bell embraced this brand new so
(17:20):
called science, and John D. Rockefeller eugenic starts to creep
into public schools. President Teddy Roosevelt is a big fan
of this book, called the Passing of the Great Race,
a rigid system of selection through the elimination of those
who are a weak or unfit. In other words, social
failures would solve the whole question in one hundred years.
(17:46):
The book's author is a man named Madison Grant, who
is widely respected at the time. He's the founder of
the American Museum of Natural History. He's a really major
conservationist and a very high ranking member of polite New
York Society. He gets a lot of fan letters from
all over the place. One of them came from Austria,
(18:07):
from a young man who wrote to Grant that the
book is now his Bible. This young Austrian man's name
Half Help. And we know what the Nazis did with
these ideas. They set up the Rice Committee for the
Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses. It sounds
(18:29):
very bureaucratic, but it's basically a child killing organization. Under
this program, children three and under with any number of
congenital disorders are condemned to be euthanized. Years before the Nazis,
(18:51):
eugenics had crept into American society in some very dark ways.
There are already institutions across the country where epileptic and
the intellectually disabled or kept separated from society. But now
more than half the states began to allow forced sterilization
of these individuals. Here's Dr Lovett. Often in those asylums
(19:15):
where sterilization, without any any information, any conversation takes place,
and those depend on the states. Indiana is one of
the first ones to introduce the sterilization law. Eight is
going to focus predominantly on mail inmates. California, for example,
and part of this has to do with that First
(19:37):
World War decides that, in fact, it's going to sterilize
as many women as men, and it sterilizes women who
wind up in what we're called feeble minded institutions. A
false assumption has now taken hold that there's a meaningful
relationship between somebody's i Q and that person's ability to
(19:57):
be a contributing and law abid fighting and moral member
of society. Lower i Q was thought to define an
undesirable sort of person, and so they imagine then that
the way to prevent further reproduction of lower i Q
(20:19):
or people minded individuals was to sterilize them. And so California,
for example, winds up sterilizing as many women as men
were as in Indiana. Partics predominant emails in Margaret Sanger
tells a Vasster College audience, this is the founder of
planned parenthood, right right, This is what she tells an
(20:39):
audience of young women. The American public is taxed, heavily
taxed to maintain an increasing race of morons, which threatens
the very foundations of our civilization. The very next year,
the United States Supreme Court, here's a case called Buck
versus Bell addressing the constitutionality of Virginia's eugenical Sterilization Act.
(21:01):
Carrie Books story could be a podcast all its own.
The state decides to sterilize Carrie Buck, even though there's
nothing wrong with her. She doesn't suffer from any sort
of malady. She's just a poor teenage mother with a
sixth grade education. Eugenics depends heavily on i Q tests.
Carrie Buck is classified as quote middle grade moron, a
(21:25):
technical classification that they actually used based on the intelligence scale,
but still put her above the levels of idiot and imbecile,
which were also terms that they actually used. Morons again,
that's how Carrie was rated. Are considered dangerous people. They're
smart enough to pass undetected and even to breed with
their so called superiors. Carrie, who is an unmarried teenager,
(21:48):
has a child, which to the experts back then, indicated
heightened sexuality and fertility, both said to be common among
the so called mentally deficient. It was really a nightmare
tangle of measurements, classifications, assumptions, and prejudices. The Supreme Court
rules eight to one that the statute doesn't violate the
(22:11):
due process cause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This decision clears
the way for the forced sterilization of some seventy thousand Americans.
Some people want to go beyond for sterilizations. They want
to actually euthanize intellectually disabled children. That means kill them.
(22:31):
It's an idea that's actually proposed in the American Journal
of Psychiatry by a neurologist named Robert Foster Kennedy July.
Kennedy argues that death is sometimes the most appropriate prescription
for children he called nature's mistakes. This defective child has
no future nor hope of one, then it is a
(22:53):
merciful and kindly thing to relieve that defective often tortured
and convulse, gro task and observed useless and fullish and
entirely undesirable of the agony of living. Basically execute them.
Shocking right, not to everybody. Back then the previous year,
(23:13):
in a poll of thousands of doctors in New York,
of the respondents said they favored legalizing euthanasia for severely
disabled kids. And back in ninety three, this was the
world that Donald T was born into. When we returned
Mary and Beamon triplet wrestle with the scientific communities insistence
(23:37):
that the best course of action is locking their baby
boy away forever. H grandfather mccravy j R. McCravey was
born in Titan County, Mississippi, in eighteen sixty six, and
he grew up on a farm in really abject power,
(24:00):
but had a mind for banking. That's Donald Triplet's brother Oliver.
Their family founded and are still part owners of the
Bank of Forest. Their mother, Mary had a college degree,
which was very rare for a woman in the middle
of Mississippi in that time. She married the former mayor's son,
Oliver Beamon Triplet Jr. Known to most people as Mr Beamon.
(24:23):
Beamon had a degree from Yale Law School, also rare
for the middle of Mississippi, and he practiced law and Forest.
My father was interested in law early on, and when
he graduated from il SAPs in the early twenties, the
state had lost its accreditation and he had a cousin
(24:44):
that lived in Valdosta, Georgia that had connections with the
University of Florida. He got him and rolled down there
in the law school and he went for two years,
but decided he wanted a more prestigious law degree and
opted to go to Yale, and so he went to
New Haven as a one year wonder and he told me, said,
(25:06):
the professor's up there. You know. Su A resented the
fact I was going up there, but he said I
was very diligent and graduated with honors. So as as
how at all came down. In three, Mary gave birth
to Donald. When Donald was three, his parents brought him
(25:30):
to Sanatorium, Mississippi, to a facility known as the preventorium.
But he wouldn't be making the return trip. Now that's
kind of a strange word, preventorium, but there actually used
to be a lot of them around the country. Children,
especially poor children, were thought to be at high risk
of tuberculosis, and doctors would send kids away to these
(25:53):
places called preventoriums to keep them safe by keeping them
out of society where the germs were. But Donald wasn't
really at risk of catching TV. That's not why he
was sent away. It was because he was different. And
this was a thing that sometimes wealthy families dead. It
was a way to institutionalize a child without having to
(26:16):
connect it to any sort of mental condition. It was
a way to dodge the stigma. And perhaps for that reason,
or perhaps they just didn't know what else to do.
That's what Donald's parents did in seven, and we wondered
what would the separation have been like for Donald's parents
to go through. Oh I, it was extremely difficult, John,
(26:38):
you could imagine, I mean this, this was her firstborn child.
Here's another member of the Triplet family. My name is
Obe Triplet, and Don is my uncle. Maman Triplet was
Don's father, and my granddad. He was a lawyer here
in town and settled here and wound up Mary and
my grandmother, her name was Mary mccrayev and Don was
(27:01):
born and everything's good, and then things started, you know, changing.
She realized that something wouldn't quite right. There's the way
you know, a picture of this. Of course, the at
the time, autism wasn't even a word that I'm aware of.
I'm not an expert or anything, but nobody knew, you know,
about it or anything. He was under the impression that
perhaps he was insane. Donald was not insane, but the
(27:26):
state of psychiatry was stunning lee primitive back in the
nineteen thirties, especially child psychiatry. That's another topic we'll be
delving into more deeply in our next episode. There was
no one in the professional ranks who could make sense
of Donald's behaviors. I asked Donald's brother Oliver, what he
thought the early signs were that his mom had noticed
(27:48):
I was ready before my time, So I told you
My earliest memory of him wasn't forty three, but from
what I'm told in a secure hearsay, he he was
unrest positive. He didn't like to cook stuff like that.
That's nothing but hearsay. I went a round for that.
(28:09):
Donald never ran to his father when he came home
from work. He never pried for his mother. They often
felt he was looking right through them. But at the
same time, he had this attachment to objects. He especially
love to spin things, but if he was interrupted while
doing that or anything else, he would have intense tantrums.
(28:34):
It became clear that Donald was protecting something really important
to him, and that was sameness, pure, unadulterated predictability. The
triplets through everything they had at trying to find an
answer for their son. They had money, they had access
to the best technological tools of the day, a car
(28:55):
and a telephone. They got Donald seen by top docters,
but nobody had an explanation for Donald's differences. And along
the way we're guessing. His parents heard some terms that
were extremely painful to hear. Defective, demented, deranged, feeble minded.
(29:16):
And when kids got these kinds of labels, there were
so often the really depressing prescription for what should be done.
Put this child away. So when there are parents who
wanted simply to keep their child at home, to make
them part of their family, doctors said don't. So this
is the kind of message we think Donald's parents were getting.
(29:39):
Sending him away was not their idea, it was the doctor's.
In fact, a doctor told Mary she was part of
the problem. You have overstimulated him. And the doctor told
them to send Donald away. That's what they were told
to do. That's what that's what was expected for them
to do, that's what was accepted at that time. And
(29:59):
they went layer and got nnny. This preventatorium looked like
a Greek temple with huge white columns out on the
front porch. And one day Donald's parents brought him there
and walked him in between the columns and they checked
him in. Mary and Beamon Triplet watched the nurse take
three year old Donald's hand and lead him down the hall.
(30:22):
Then they turned away and left. I can't imagine. There
was much conversation on the drive back home. Being in
the preventatorium was not good for Donald. There had been
a light in his eyes before he got to this place.
He had been a noisy and active kid, and curious
(30:42):
and creative. But all of that went dead at the preventorium,
and almost all at once. We found a photograph of
Donald from this period where we never expected to. It
wasn't a report on the preventatorium wished in. On page
(31:02):
thirty three, there's Donald. He's sitting on the front steps
surrounded by a dozen other kids. The other kids are
clearly reacting to something they're they're smiling, and they're giggling
like the photographer had just made a joke to get
them to laugh for the picture. But not Donald. He's
just staring at the camera, not looking happy at all.
(31:23):
And we underaged some medical notes on his time there,
and they said he basically went silent. He wasn't healthy
at all. The quote in the notes is that he
faded away physically and he sat motionless, not paying attention
to anything. All the things Donald used to like to
pick up and examine and spin, like blocks and books
(31:46):
and toy trucks, and pots and pans. He stopped reaching
for them or for anything. The examining doctor later concluded,
it seems that he had his worst phase. Donald's mom
and dad really missed their son, and they were not
giving up on helping him. Somehow. One day Beamon sat
down with his secretary, Katherine Robertson, and he started to
(32:09):
dictate a letter, which she typed up pages and pages
of its single space thirty three pages long of observations
of Donald's behaviors. In time, the words Beamon spoke and
that Ms. Robertson typed up would travel far and wide.
They would be quoted in scholarly research, discussed in university classrooms,
(32:29):
translated into multiple languages, words that still paint a vivid
portrait and helped to define the diagnosis that we call autism.
Simply put this letter, this cry for help. It opened
a door to a new way of understanding. Coming up
(32:52):
on Autism's first child, older Donald T. Sive years old,
Din was victim I cleaned from Forest, Mississippi, and made
me aware for the first time of the behavior pattern
noth neon to meet or anyone else debt to four.
(33:15):
Even though I was diagnosed at the age of eleven,
where autism didn't really mean anything at that point. Um,
I only knew that I was different and the different
was bad. You're cruel. Kids can be particularly young, right.
You don't keep secrets in small pounds, you know. I
think the combination of the bank of the respect that
his family had earned went a long way towards the
(33:39):
community realizing that here's this family with a great deal
of stature in the community who have a son that's
causing them a great deal of struggle. I think something
to be considered about Donald Triplet is that he's in
a homachiness space, which means that the family had means
and access and power. The framework for doing that. Some
(34:00):
diagnostic test itself is based on how white people understand
behavior and language. I'm John don Vent. I'm Karen Zucker.
Autism's First Child is a production of School of Humans
and I Heart Podcasts and based on our book and
documentary film in a Different Key. The podcast is produced
(34:21):
by Alexander Ritchie. Our story editors are Matt Riddle and
Alex French, senior staff writer at I Heart Originals. Original
score composed and mixed by Alice McCoy. Scoring mixing and
mastering by Ryan Peoples. Voiceovers by Zoe Wert, Michael Coscarelli,
David Perry, Christopher Paul Stelling, and Louis Carloso. The Rainman
(34:43):
clip courtesy of MGM Media Licensing Archival sound thanks to
Craig Smith at freesound dot org. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott,
Brandon Barr, Elsie Crowley and Jason English. Special thanks to
Ray Conley, Ernie Intra Doot and Will Pearson School of
(35:15):
Humans
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