The phone hasn’t stopped ringing, even though Friday’s show at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center was sold out weeks ago. “I think I got six calls yesterday,” Mandy Moyer, Bowlus director, said Tuesday morning. “Tickets are still in high demand. I keep apologizing to people, but there’s nothing we can do. It will be a full house Friday.”
Temple Grandin, recognized author and speaker on both autism and animal behavior, will speak this Friday at 7 p.m. in the Bowlus. The event has drawn remarkable interest. So much so, an extra educational show has been arranged for Friday morning.
“Amanda Holman, Iola High School’s FFA sponsor, reached out to me back in December asking for tickets. A couple hours later, the FFA sponsor from Yates Center also called,” recalled Moyer. “At that point, we were almost sold out.” It was then that Moyer realized she wouldn’t be able to accommodate everyone. So she decided to get creative.
“I called Amanda back and asked her to reach out to other FFA sponsors in the area. I told her, ‘If you can give me a number of students who may be interested in attending an educational show, that gives me something to negotiate.’”
There was no need to ask twice. Demand was so high, Grandin will speak Friday at 10 a.m. in front of over 300 students from 12 area high schools, Allen Community College, and Iola Middle School.
“We have students coming from Eureka, Madison, Girard and even Sedan,” said Moyer. “We’ll have a lot of new faces in the Bowlus, and that’s very exciting.”
GRANDIN is a renowned professor of animal science at Colorado State University. She’s been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and in 2023 was awarded an honorary Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from Kansas State University.
Her work on the humane treatment of animals has been revolutionary; facilities she designed now handle over half the cattle in the U.S., and she has authored more than 60 papers on animal behavior.
As a child, Grandin did not speak until she was three-and-a-half years old. Early speech therapy, supportive parents, and strong teachers pushed back against medical advice of the time, which labeled Grandin as someone suffering from “brain damage” and recommended institutionalization. As an adult, she was later diagnosed with autism.
Grandin’s writings are credited as some of the first and most insightful accounts of living with autism. British neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote that Grandin’s first book, “Emergence: Labeled Autistic,” was “unprecedented because there had never before been an inside narrative of autism.”
Later books by Grandin, including “Navigating Autism,” “Thinking in Picture: My Life with Autism,” and “Visual Thinking,” have helped make her one of the country’s leading spokespersons on autism. She was the focus of a major 2010 HBO biographical drama, “Temple Grandin,” starring Claire Danes.
Grandin advocates passionately against labeling children. “One of the problems today is for a kid to get any special services in school, they have to have a label. The problem with autism is you’ve got a spectrum that ranges from Einstein to someone with no language and intellectual disability,” said Grandin. “Steve Jobs was probably mildly on the autistic spectrum. Basically, you’ve probably known people who were geeky and socially awkward but very smart. When do geeks and nerds become autistic? That’s a gray area. Half the people in Silicon Valley probably have autism.”
ACCORDING TO Moyer, Grandin’s appearance at the Bowlus “is the first sold-out show we’ve had since launching the speaker series several years ago.” The series is funded by the Sleeper Family Trust.
Moyer attributes the demand to two things: a vibrant rural community and keen interest from educators.
“We have people coming from as far as Manhattan, Kanas. The agriculture focus has had a big pull for our community,” said Moyer. But she also noted the event has had strong interest from educators. “We’ve had so many school districts buy tickets that we had to create a new type of ticket without sales tax.”
The Raven Book Store in Lawrence will provide Grandin’s books for sale Friday evening, and Moyer is busy with last-minute preparations for a full house.
