Donald the First

Donald Grey Triplett                                                                          John Donvan & Caren Zucker

Donald Grey Triplett is a healthy 82 years old. He lives in the house in which he grew up, in a small town in Mississippi where everyone knows him, likes him, and looks out for him. He drives a Cadillac and golfs every day. He loves to travel and has done so extensively both in the United States and abroad. He was also the first child diagnosed with autism. How did a boy whom one doctor said suffered from "some glandular disease" and another said was "overstimulated," whose father described him as “perfectly oblivious to everything about him” graduate from college and create a comfortable life for himself? Apparently, most of the credit belongs to Donald's mother, who brought him home from the institution to which he, like most anomalous children in those days, had been sent at age 3 and who never gave up on him ~ and to Donald himself. Interestingly, the person to correctly diagnose Donald was a Baltimore psychiatrist named Dr. Leo Kanner, who was working with a George Frankl, who before the Nazi invasion of his native Austria had been the chief diagnostician for Dr. Hans Asperger. According to a recent book, Asperger's attitude toward autism was much closer to the one currently held than was Kanner's (http://somanyinterestingthings.blogspot.com/2015/09/dr-asperger-and-nazis.html). Donald's life story, in fact, would not have surprised Dr. Asperger in the least: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35350880 and (an earlier, more detailed piece) http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/10/autisms-first-child/308227/