Introducing: Autism's First Child

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Mary and Beamon Triplet Forest, Mississippi, placed their three year
old son in an institution. Doctor said it was for
the best. Donald was different. He didn't run to his
father when he returned home from work, he didn't snuggle
his mother. In that era, scientists and academics and politicians

(00:27):
classified people like Donald as defective or deranged, a threat
to society. I mean, 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
eugenics was really a big movement to the United States.
That meant judging babies like cattle or sheep in contests

(00:50):
and county affairs across the country. The triplets eventually changed
their mind. They brought Donald's home and then to Baltimore
to see a founder of child psychiatry, Dr Lee O'Connor,
and that visit changed history. Of course, the at the time,
autism wasn't even a word. Nobody knew you know about

(01:11):
it or anything. Case one Donald T. That's how he
appears in Dr Connor's work, And seven decades later we
tracked Donald T down. You got a book up there.
What a book? This book is that you de boom
about you and John, Well, it's about you, accellent, Yeah,

(01:32):
actually about me. I'm Karen Zucker and I'm John don
Vent for us, finding Donald Triplett was a mission. We
had to carry out a search for living history. And
now you can beat him in our new podcast, Autism's
First Child. But when we went to Forest in search
of Donald, we found so much more. Well, I've always

(01:54):
known do I don't remember not knowing Don. It's all
we loved on. He's a most famous person. We found
a whole community that embraced him and learned about Donald's
remarkable life. It's hard not to love him. He's involved
in the country club. He has friends there, he has
friends everywhere. It's a story at the intersection of class, race,

(02:17):
and resources. It's a story about empathy and understanding and
a diagnosis that changed history. Listen to Autism's First Child,
an I Heart original podcast, starting April fourteen, on the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find
your favorite shows.