Speaker 1: Mary and Beamon Triplet Forest, Mississippi, placed their three year
Speaker 1: old son in an institution. Doctor said it was for
Speaker 1: the best. Donald was different. He didn't run to his
Speaker 1: father when he returned home from work, he didn't snuggle
Speaker 1: his mother. In that era, scientists and academics and politicians
Speaker 1: classified people like Donald as defective or deranged, a threat
Speaker 1: to society. I mean, I don't think people are that
Speaker 1: familiar with the fact that from really the early nineteen
Speaker 1: hundreds up until the beginning of World War two, essentially
Speaker 1: eugenics was really a big movement to the United States.
Speaker 1: That meant judging babies like cattle or sheep in contests
Speaker 1: and county affairs across the country. The triplets eventually changed
Speaker 1: their mind. They brought Donald's home and then to Baltimore
Speaker 1: to see a founder of child psychiatry, Dr Lee O'Connor,
Speaker 1: and that visit changed history. Of course, the at the time,
Speaker 1: autism wasn't even a word. Nobody knew you know about
Speaker 1: it or anything. Case one Donald T. That's how he
Speaker 1: appears in Dr Connor's work, And seven decades later we
Speaker 1: tracked Donald T down. You got a book up there.
Speaker 1: What a book? This book is that you de boom
Speaker 1: about you and John, Well, it's about you, accellent, Yeah,
Speaker 1: actually about me. I'm Karen Zucker and I'm John don
Speaker 1: Vent for us, finding Donald Triplett was a mission. We
Speaker 1: had to carry out a search for living history. And
Speaker 1: now you can beat him in our new podcast, Autism's
Speaker 1: First Child. But when we went to Forest in search
Speaker 1: of Donald, we found so much more. Well, I've always
Speaker 1: known do I don't remember not knowing Don. It's all
Speaker 1: we loved on. He's a most famous person. We found
Speaker 1: a whole community that embraced him and learned about Donald's
Speaker 1: remarkable life. It's hard not to love him. He's involved
Speaker 1: in the country club. He has friends there, he has
Speaker 1: friends everywhere. It's a story at the intersection of class, race,
Speaker 1: and resources. It's a story about empathy and understanding and
Speaker 1: a diagnosis that changed history. Listen to Autism's First Child,
Speaker 1: an I Heart original podcast, starting April fourteen, on the
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.