Temple Grandin, featured this month as the subject of an HBO original film bearing her name, was born in Boston, Mass., in 1947. At the age of 3, doctors diagnosed her with autism and recommended she be institutionalized. She had yet to speak.

Yet Grandin would go on to become one of the most respected people in the field of livestock psychology, and to date she has designed facilities for commercial cattle handling through which half the cattle in the United States are processed. Along that long road to success, Rindge was a formulative stop.

Grandin attended Hampshire Country School and what was then Franklin Pierce College, now Franklin Pierce University. It is through these schools that she developed the skills she would use later in life, she says.

“Regular high school was torture for me,” Grandin, who now teaches at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colo., says in a phone interview. “That is how I ended up at the Hampshire Country School.”

Before Hampshire, Grandin attended a large girls’ school where students threw books at her and teased her. Grandin’s mother, a journalist, found out about Hampshire Country School while completing a television documentary and decided it would be a good fit for her daughter.

Hampshire Country School, founded in 1948, is still in operation, although it is an all-boys’ school now. Former headmaster William Dickerson says it is a school for precisely the type of student Grandin was: brilliant but different.

Psychologist Henry Patey started the school and served as its headmaster during the time Grandin was a student.

“His interest was in bright kids that were different or running into troubles,” Dickerson says. “They were often dumped by the system, and yet those difficulties were often their strengths.”

Grandin thought visually, a skill that allowed her to excel at hands-on work, but she lagged behind in lessons requiring abstract thought.

With class sizes of four students, Hampshire Country School allowed Grandin the individual attention she needed.

Grandin was already interested in horses when she arrived at Hampshire Country School, and she got the opportunity to care for horses at the school as well as for other farm animals.

“I got work experience taking care of horses in the horse barn,” Grandin says. “A lot of quirky kids get into problems not getting work experience. I was learning good work skills feeding the horses and putting them in and out of the barn.”

Most important of all, Hampshire Country School was where Grandin met William Carlock, a science teacher who would become her mentor.

“A good teacher can turn a student around,” Grandin says. “Mr. Carlock got me interested in studying.”

In the HBO film, which Grandin describes as very accurate, Carlock takes Grandin under his wing, working hard to connect with her visual thought process. Grandin would continue to visit Carlock as she attended Franklin Pierce and perform science projects with him, which helped keep her on track.

“The experience Temple had was a good, accurate Hampshire Country School experience,” Dickerson says. “I once heard a parent say it was very important their child sits close to the teacher. Here, all students sit close to the teacher.”

Grandin says she approves of the direction the school is taking working on reducing class size and only accepting boys. She says she hopes another school will take up the mantle for girls. Her one regret is that the horse barn burned down several years ago.

“That was sad,” Grandin says. “That was one of my favorite places.”

Grandin spoke at her graduation, an event that made her nervous and excited. She spoke the words to “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” a show tune from the Rogers and Hammerstein musical “Carousel.”

After Hampshire Country School, Grandin went to Franklin Pierce College, which was just down the road, she says.

“My mother thought maybe I could handle it and talked to the dean,” Grandin says. “He was willing to give me a try.”

That was in 1966. The fledgling college, which had been founded in 1962, was small enough to give Grandin the individual attention she continued to need, but it was not easy in the beginning.

“I had some good friends, but there was still teasing there,” Grandin says. “I’m not going to name names, but there was some.”

A turning point at Franklin Pierce was a talent show where Grandin helped to build scenery. She says doing this activity with other people turned her social life around.

In class, Grandin continued to be a difficult student, but there were professors ready to put in the work teaching her required. One was Normand Dion, who still teaches part time at Franklin Pierce University. Grandin was one of his first students at Franklin Pierce.

“Mr. Dion, the math teacher, tutored me through math class,” Grandin says. “He would do the whole class over again for me. That got me through.”

Dion unhesitatingly describes Grandin as a volatile student.

“I think she would agree with me,” Dion says.

While Grandin kept her outbursts confined to Dion’s office and out of the classroom, she was still quite a challenge. What Dion grew to understand was that Grandin was a perfectionist.
Grandin originally tried to waive out of the math class, but Dion held firm that she should take the course.

“I think it was a good thing for her that she did do that,” Dion says. “She got A’s and I think it was good for her ability to see things through to the end, which she needed at that time.”
Dion would let her tantrums run their course, allowing her to holler and scream. A young professor, he was determined he was going to come out on top. When her outbursts were finished, they would start the lesson again.

And while there were some horrible scenes in his office, a mutual respect developed, too. During parents’ weekend, Dion recalls, Grandin made sure to introduce him to her father, and they sat together at the banquet.

Grandin says her time at Franklin Pierce prepared her well for the next stages of her life, particularly as a small school.

“I would have been lost in a big state university,” Grandin says. “In undergrad, if I was stuck in with 300 students, I would have had problems.”

Grandin graduated in 1970. Now she is world famous, a best selling author and a successful engineer of humane livestock facilities. But she still keeps in contact with her alma mater and donates to the Franklin Pierce annual fund.

They haven’t forgotten her either. In 1989, Grandin received the first-ever alumni achievement award. In 2008, the university presented her with a Leader of Conscience Award for her work in the humane treatment of animals.

She earned her Ph. D from the University of Illinois in 1989.

Grandin would go on to use her ability to think in pictures to envision how livestock see their world. She attended Arizona State University, where she had to overcome preconceptions about her condition and prevalent sexism. At one point, cattle herders hoping to chase her away covered her car with bull testicles.

Beginning by writing articles for livestock magazines, Grandin eventually penned books on livestock management and on autism. Her book, “Animals Make Us Human” was a bestseller. Other titles include “Animals in Translation,” “Thinking in Pictures,” “The Way I See It” and half a dozen others.

Facilities she has designed for handling animals are used in the United States, Canada, Europe, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries. Almost half of the cattle in North America are handled in a center track retainer system she designed for meat plants.
Once such a difficult student, Grandin now has students of her own. She lives in Fort Collins, Col., and is a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University.