They All Have High Hopes

By Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles

The idiot savant has a long tradition in the U.S., much of it as victim. A typical 19th century savant, Tom Bethune was sightless and barely able to grunt monosyllables. But he had the ability to play complicated classical piano pieces by ear, and promoters exhibited him in vaudeville as an amusing freak. Since that time, savants -- retarded and autistic people who have inexplicable gifts, usually in art, mathematics and music -- have been the objects of diversion and exploitation. But at a unique institution called Hope University in Anaheim, Calif., they are being trained to reveal their surprising gifts and develop self-confidence. Some have multiple handicaps: Paul Kuehn, for example, is blind, yet he has the ability to reproduce and create music and is one of the stars of a school group, the Hi Hopes, who have sung to thunderous applause at concerts from Disneyland and Las Vegas to the White House lawn and the stage of Opryland.

Kuehn and 37 other young adults owe their progress to a dynamic 62-year-old school secretary turned educator. Recalls Doris Walker: "I was a little old lady in tennis shoes to my classmates when I went back to college to get a degree in special education." With her new teaching certificate in hand, she took over a public school special-education class in Buena Park, Calif. Twelve years later, in 1980, she founded Hope University-Unico National College for the Gifted Mentally Retarded. Despite the grand title, the institution is located in two cramped rooms behind a shopping center. Still, says Walker, "we have a good beginning, and I have big plans." Among them: a new building with 22 classrooms to be funded by Unico National, the Italian- American service organization that has adopted the school as one of its charities.

The college's slogan is "adult education through the fine arts." As Walker explains it, "We want to develop the whole person, and we use the elements of performance, music education, music therapy, drama, dance and art to enable our students to achieve new awareness, personal growth and change in their lives." She developed her approach while at Buena Park, where one of her students, Kuehn, was considered autistic and virtually untrainable. During a music period she mumbled under her breath, "Now what key do we do this song in?" Kuehn correctly piped up, "Key of G." His vocal training began immediately and gave rise to the first Hi Hopes group.

A few years later Gary Ahearn sat down at the organ in a Los Angeles special-education classroom. Facing the keyboard for the first time, he played an imperfect but recognizable version of Liszt's Liebestraume. A teacher brought him to Walker, and today he plays eight instruments. Like Ahearn, the students at Hope University have learned emotional and physical control through music and art instruction. Indeed, Hope's program has been so successful that many students now hold part-time jobs.

Walker believes that such potentially productive students could fill schools like Hope University across the U.S. She has a point: savants are of growing interest to psychologists. Leon Miller, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, feels that "few researchers have looked at mental retardation in a fine-grain fashion. They haven't gone into the heads of the kids." Psychologist Bernard Rimland, of the Institute for Child Behavior Research in San Diego, notes, "It isn't surprising that we don't understand much about these aberrations. We haven't even begun to understand how the normal brain functions."

Researchers, however, have been making some progress. Darold Treffert, a psychiatrist in Fond du Lac, Wis., who is a nationally recognized expert on savants, points out that sophisticated tools like computerized scans have improved methods for investigating the functions of the brain. Reading and language ability seem to be controlled by the left side of the brain; art, music and mathematics by the right. Says Treffert: "The skills of the savants are generally right-brain skills, and we know that in many cases of savants there is left-brain damage." He explains, "We think now that the right brain tends to overdevelop in order to compensate for left-brain injury or other prenatal influences that cause underdevelopment of the left side."

Treffert is studying an autistic patient who can listen to a 45-minute opera tape and then play it on the piano and sing it flawlessly. In New York, interest has centered on William Britt, 53, who lived for many years in an ) institution on Staten Island for the mentally retarded. Britt is attending a community college and has had two one-man shows of his paintings. In Connecticut, one 31-year-old man, diagnosed as autistic when a child, has become a gifted pianist. In Baton Rouge, La., Kathy Dial, a child with severe brain damage, has a vocal repertoire of some 300 songs.

The gifts of the savants, writes Neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, can be a "quality that takes one aback." He says, "Often the severely retarded have plenty of potential if educated right," but adds, "The question is, What constitutes right? The mental language of each person is different." Nevertheless, the parents of Hope University students take heart at the ways Walker and her small staff are developing talent and self-confidence. As one father, University of California Biology Professor Howard Lenhoff, puts it,"The one thing that worries every parent of a retarded child is what will happen to them after we die. Developing our daughter's music and teaching her to perform it in public have given her an option she did not have before."