An Idiotic Savant

By Russell O. Stewart

In his autobiography, he tells of awaking in a bordello at five years old, the only place his family could afford, placed in various foster homes, and then at seven years old, he was incarcerated in a home for juvenile delinquents. He was diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome, characterized with immature behavior and lack of fear of harm, or pain of even fear of death, which led him to experience almost unbelievable adventures: one of which was to love women in a dozen foreign cultures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493123384

Russell O. Stewart

Russell Stewart, the author of An Idiotic Savant, graduated from Princeton University with honors in the Department of Psychology and spent summers working with the handicapped and blind. As a naval officer, he refused direct orders from his superiors to save lives. He developed a mathematical formula for which an American Airline company paid one million dollars and discovered the first multi-bladed razor in a British laboratory and launched it for the Gillette Company.

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Copyright © 2013 by Russell O. Stewart.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2013919617

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4931-2337-7

                Softcover       978-1-4931-2336-0

                eBook            978-1-4931-2338-4

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This book was printed in the United States of America.

Rev. date: 11/25/2013

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Introduction

To fortify our minds against . . . misfortunes we should make them a principle study of our lives.

—Thomas Jefferson

I have done just that for the last sixty years and will now present my experiences, misfortunes, and the reasons they occurred that have been beyond my control. However, the successes were sweet having listened to Warren Buffet and avoided the stock market crash. As a male model and a lookalike of the actor George Peppard, I was bedded by close to a dozen women from different cultures each displaying different ways of making love.

The cause of Asperger’s syndrome has been disputed but identified by the following conditions: the weight and volume of the left hemisphere of the brain is larger than that of the general population possibly due to excessive neuronal development, and the right hemisphere is smaller, reflecting the lack of use; infrequent eye contact; exceptional knowledge; substantial increase in pain threshold, resulting in self-injury; frequent tantrums and finally inability to communicate readily; but with the unique ability to design and develop mathematical algorithms without writing them down.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, child abuse and neglect affect some six million children each year, and cost about eighty billion dollars in hospital fees, law enforcement, and child welfare. Most of the children are under five years old, born out of wedlock, and are usually raised by single mothers. The risks for academic and behavioral problems increase in these situations; however, research shows that once the abuse ends, positive brain changes follow.

The majority of the children are under five years old, and 40 percent are born out of wedlock, with the majority of them raised by just their mothers. The risk factors are parental depression, substance abuse, and whether the parent had been abused as a child. It further reports that problems in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for thinking, planning, reasoning, and decision making, can lead to behavioral and academic problems. Further, they state when the abuse ends and they are more supported, they see positive brain changes.

As this book is about to go to press in the next few days I have been introduced to a book, Islands of Genius by Darold Treffert a leading expert on Savants. He reviewed many of those individuals with prodigious abilities especially those with Savant Syndrome. It became clear to me that I was neither an idiot savant nor as unusual as someone with the Savant Syndrome.

Nevertheless my behavior has been idiotic and I am a savant in terms of general usage of this term, which designates those with exceptional scientific knowledge, as I will discuss below. I did not plan on discussing my personal characteristics but I will do so herein.

As a child of five years old I was diagnosed with mild autism, which was latter determined to be Asperser’s Syndrome. My short-term memory is so poor that I cannot remember more than ten words in a sequence or numbers for that matter. And to play a guitar I had to read the music score, as I could not remember a dozen notes.

On the other hand my spatial and mechanical abilities are not ordinary: as I build furniture; one piece, a wall cabinet, for which I was paid over $40,000 (in today’s dollars). On a day my wife and I were sailing near the north side of Long Island when we were covered in a dense fog and decided to return to the south shore of Connecticut. I tacked and headed north telling my wife that we should pass a certain buoy in two hours plus of minus one minute. Without a GPS, or direct knowledge of the wind speed, the current tide level nor the speed or direction of the current, I calculated the vectors without charting them. We came out of the fog within one minute of the two hours, with perhaps 60 second to reach the buoy.

On my first day on the bridge of the USS Hornet, an 85,000-ton aircraft carrier, I was asked by the captain to take control of the ship movement and bring it into the convoy. I gave my orders to the helmsman in terms of degrees left or right, as if I had been doing it all my life. Without looking at the ships compass. Merely by my feeling of the ship’s responds to my command to placed in to its designated position. The captain remarked that during his thirty years of experience he had never seen any one with out training or experience handle a boat of this size with my confidence and skill.

Finally, for my Senior Thesis, I was the first person in the world to determine the capacity of the human optical nerve. With this success I was a honored with a fellowship in Sigma Xi, and graduated with honors without ever being able to remember more than ten sequential words.

Let me explain what I believe may cause this syndrome. The human’s large brain size with the resulting skull dimensions is too large to pass the birth canal at maturity, so human children are born prematurely. Thus, after birth the brain continues to develop and grow, as does the skull. During this period of one to five years, the child is very susceptible to trauma or lack of affection, which gives the young one a sense of security. In order to reduce the negative environmental impact, the child’s brain cuts down on the unwanted stimulation by closing off much of the right side of brain’s activity, which is primarily used to interact with other humans, primarily his mother. This directly leads to lack of eye contact necessary for maturity. This allows the left hemisphere to grow more than normal as the right hemisphere atrophies. This results in greater mathematical and scientific capacity leading to superior intelligence. See source WebMD.

In my case, the immaturity led me to do idiotic things like driving at night with my family but with a challenge to see how far I could drive a tank full of gasoline, without thinking of the obvious consequence of running of gas, which is exactly what happened. This profound lack of thinking about the consequence of my actions led me to the adventure of travel and loving beyond the normal behavior, which many people find hard to believe.

Having known men with Asperger’s, I have found a pattern in their lives, which are remarkably similar. They all showed high intelligence with unusual creative ability and are unique in excelling at different hobbies with skills beyond the ordinary, to make money doing what they like doing. This means that though they lacked social skills to succeed in the corporate world, they could contribute handsomely to society. It further suggests that at a young age, they could advance these abilities earlier with the help of parents or small firms that could actually use them when corporations could not adjust to their idiosyncrasies.

I suffered with the frustration of knowing what I believe is the true nature of reality, but being without the ability to communicate to others with any success. Like a messenger who brings news that is novel and therefore rejected out of hand, I was frequently punished as a heretic.

I acknowledged that I was different from anyone I had ever met, but I did not understand why I had frequent rages, which resulted in my the loss of more than half my jobs, or why I felt no pain when I was wounded in my military service, or run down by a car while riding a bike. I even had an eight-inch branch driven up my leg, which I didn’t notice until I looked down to discover my shoe was full of blood.

I could wake up with the solution to a mathematical problem requiring a dozen equations. At the same time, I could not communicate my thoughts or needs to others, nor did I feel any sadness seeing the death of shipmates, but would cry on and off for two years over the loss of my pet cat.

At age sixty, I happened to come across a book by Dr. Oliver Sacks, professor of neurology at NYU School of Medicine, and a leader in mental abnormality, titled An Anthropologist on Mars. I found a description of a so-called Asperger’s syndrome, where someone was quoted, I have Asperger’s syndrome, which makes me less vulnerable to the loss of loved ones. He further described one of the qualities of this syndrome as akin to the intelligence of true creativity. I was the first person in history to measure the information capacity of the optic nerve, discovered, named, and marketed the world’s first multi-bladed razor, created a mathematical algorithm for which and an American airlines paid one million dollars.

Dr. Sacks goes on to detail the history of Ms. Temple Grandin, who designed and constructed complex structures without any diagrams.

This was strikingly similar to my own experience, when at fourteen years old I designed the reconstruction of an antique barn using the post-and-beam method. Without any drawings, I built the barn by hand, raising all 72 joints, which fit perfectly together. It was then approved for occupancy by the town’s building department, and was finally sold at one hundred times its original value.

To truly understand this syndrome, Dr. Sacks says, Nothing less than a total biography will do. And that is just what I wish to do.

Chapter 1

The Great Depression had its consequences. My father and both his brother and sister died of smoking and alcohol-related diseases, resulting from lack of employment and personal depression during the Great Depression.

My story begins with the crash of 1929, which affected most Americans, but destroyed my family for the next thirty years. My maternal grandmother, born in Stockholm, Sweden, was the leading dress designer of St. Paul, but as the Depression worsened, fewer and fewer of even the wealthiest could afford a custom-designed evening dresses and her husband could not find work. To maintain some income, my mother, as a teenager, had to travel several hours each day to a store in Minneapolis to paint signs for ten cents each instead of attending art school, which she had wished for all her young life. She would often come home with less than a dollar after paying for carfare.

Meanwhile, my father-to-be, the great-grandson of the first governor of the state, and out of work was stealing the family’s silver to maintain his supply of alcohol; he never got to find work except to deliver mail. He and my mom-to-be married and ran away from the local deprivation both felt. They were a handsome couple: a blond Swedish beauty and a red-headed Scotsman, who was a boxer and sportsman, well built with a height of six feet and five inches. Though they planned to leave all their problems behind by going to San Francisco, California, he could not leave his alcoholic addiction behind; and even if he found work as a postman, as soon as he was paid at weeks end, he would buy a bottle of whisky and be so drunk that the police would call my mother each Saturday night or Sunday morning asking her to come pick up her husband. On good days they would go out to a restaurant and order a single bowl of soup, fill it with free crackers and a bottle of ketchup, a dinner for two, at a cost of twenty-five cents.

Within a year, as bad luck would have it, they would have not one but two children a few days before Christmas in 1934 at the height of the Depression. My brother and I, who were born prematurely, were placed in incubators, requiring my mother to use a breast bump every few hours and give it to a waiting nurse. My father never bothered to visit the hospital or gave my mother any moral support. Now she had given up art school and future of happiness and shortly a marriage. She returned to St. Paul, but could not find work to support a family and decided to go to New York to seek a new life. My grandparents offered to keep the twins, but my mother would not consider any connection with my fraternal family, except to accept money for the twins support. She did find work as a floor manager at Lord & Taylor, and her sister joined her and found the cheapest accommodations available but in a bordello on Twelfth Street, New York City. I did not find out why she treated us so badly until I asked why she acted so terribly toward us. Only upon dying did she tell me why.

My life begins in this brothel on Twelfth Street when I became conscious for the first time at five years old. I could walk with complete dexterity, and talk with complete fluency. The first thought was sophisticated for a five-year-old: how could I have been in a virtual coma for several years and yet be able to speak? I must have been able to hear during the coma as perhaps others have during a coma. My first observation upon awakening was that I was on a mattress placed on a windowsill. The windows were the size of a store window rising from a wide sill to the ceiling some twelve feet in the air. My twin brother was sleeping on the next window over.

There were two women in this one room apartment whom I would come to learn were my mother and her younger sister. We were served breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, still my favorite. We were then led down stairs past a booth with a fat man who sat behind a large window with a round hole in the middle to the back of the building where we were deposited at an outside garden, with wooden seats for two or three people. There were bushes and flowers all around along a path that wandered around a large area with trees. My mother introduced us to several young ladies and promptly left for work without a word.

These young ladies immediately sat next to my brother and me. They held our hands and hugged us with loving tenderness and sang softly. It would be one of the happiest times of my life. When these ladies left, some others would appear and again hold us tightly in their arms and then would take us by our hand and walk us around the garden. We never saw any men, but the girls often talked about men who always had the same name, John. They talked about having to leave for their next John or the need to dress a certain way for John who was coming in the afternoon. Ironically, we were almost never to see an adult male for years to come. And it was only years later did I understand that these ladies had no one to love, and we were getting the benefit of all their affection. We would not experience this joy for many years to come.

After several days spent in the brothel, we were taken to an awaiting yellow cab. It must have been Saturday and the first day off for our mother. My brother and I played with the folding bucket seats in the back of cab. Neither our mother nor aunt spoke to us except to say, Stop playing with the seats. As I write these words, I realize that I never did converse with my mother until her deathbed.

It was just as you see in the movies, prisoners are moved to new cells or perhaps to death row, without any warning or conversation because guards don’t want any resistance or an unpleasant response. After a long ride, we arrived to a nice little white house, where we were introduced to an older woman and taken to a bedroom upstairs. It was a neat as a pin with the beds made up and a number of toys on the floor, the first toys we had ever seen and, unfortunately, the last.

After a few days, we were removed from this nice home and taken to a new family’s house. We found out later that our mother complained that she did not want her children in a home that was too neat, as these people were anal. The next family was found to be Catholic and, therefore, unacceptable to my mother; then the father of the next family had palsy, with the same results. It finally dawned on me that as soon as we bonded with a family, by saying we were happy, we were summarily withdrawn from that household.

The last foster family we were to stay with for a couple of years consisted of a father, a mother, and a teenage son. The father, a milkman, picked up his horse at a local stable and drove his route from dawn to the late afternoon. As my brother and I were sent to bed before the father returned home, we never remember seeing him. The mother never talked to us nor offered us a toy. I must have assumed that not having toys was normal except for anal people. I believed we were not sent to a new home because this foster mother had her own son to love and offered us little emotional contact.

We were given twenty-five cents each day to buy lunch at school, but on the way, we were forced to pay our quarter to the local teenage gang to gain passage, so lunch was out of the question. We were without the noon meal for two years. I don’t know why we didn’t tell our foster parents about the lack of lunch, but we took life as it was dealt. As my brother was even shyer than I, I was asked by our homeroom teacher to look after him. But I was not paying much more attention as I was always looking out the window. After school, we were fed at home and sent to bed, without TV, a radio, a book, or even a toy bunny. We were not permitted to talk, and so we lay in bed by the hour waiting for sleep to come, which frequently lasted for hours depending on the time of year. Naturally, in deep summer, the sun wouldn’t set till almost 10:00 p.m., and our window to the south had direct sunlight, and even with the shades pulled down the sun would peek in around the edges no matter what. So this was sometimes four hours of torture. When I finally fell asleep, my only dream was of being in an infinite desert with no end in sight. This dream would continue for years without any change. It didn’t seem strange then, but I can readily understand that without any stimulation or human contact, what was there to dream about?

About this time, I was sent to a child psychologist, Dr. Woodward, assigned by the New York City Aid Society. She explained that I was diagnosed with mild autism