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Jan. 18th, 2023 08:25 amYou know how people say 'in the old days there wasn't any of this autism / ADHD stuff'? And how a lot of moderns will respond with 'no, that's true, but there were the kids everyone called changelings or that weird quiet kid who watched the cows without talking for hours on end'?
I think- I could be wrong, but given accounts of his behavior, I think- I may have found a more recent and more specific example of You Can't Tell Me This Guy Was Neurotypical. His name was George Edward "Rube" Waddell, he was born in 1876, and he's in the Baseball Hall of Fame:
Biographer Alan Levy wrote that Waddell was "a decidedly different sort of child". At the age of three, he wandered over to a local fire station and stayed there for several days... [as an adult] He also had a longstanding fascination with fire trucks and ran off the field to chase after them during games on multiple occasions. He was easily distracted by opposing fans who held up puppies, which caused him to run over to play with them, and shiny objects, which seemed to put him in a trance. His eccentric behavior led to constant battles with his managers and scuffles with bad-tempered teammates... [About a melodrama he performed in] His performance in The Stain of Guilt was notable in that his co-stars, who had realized that he was incapable of memorizing his lines(emphasis mine), allowed him to improvise his lines for every show.
Dude was a hell of a pitcher but also an alcoholic and prone to getting into fights, and died at 37 of TB. But honestly, looking at his wackadoodle life's record- I left out the part where his team lost track of him during one off-season and eventually found him wrestling alligators in a circus- I can't laugh at the guy, because so much of his behavior doesn't seem funny, it seems like a severe case of non-standard neural wiring. Even if nobody recognized that kind of thing at the time.
I think- I could be wrong, but given accounts of his behavior, I think- I may have found a more recent and more specific example of You Can't Tell Me This Guy Was Neurotypical. His name was George Edward "Rube" Waddell, he was born in 1876, and he's in the Baseball Hall of Fame:
Biographer Alan Levy wrote that Waddell was "a decidedly different sort of child". At the age of three, he wandered over to a local fire station and stayed there for several days... [as an adult] He also had a longstanding fascination with fire trucks and ran off the field to chase after them during games on multiple occasions. He was easily distracted by opposing fans who held up puppies, which caused him to run over to play with them, and shiny objects, which seemed to put him in a trance. His eccentric behavior led to constant battles with his managers and scuffles with bad-tempered teammates... [About a melodrama he performed in] His performance in The Stain of Guilt was notable in that his co-stars, who had realized that he was incapable of memorizing his lines(emphasis mine), allowed him to improvise his lines for every show.
Dude was a hell of a pitcher but also an alcoholic and prone to getting into fights, and died at 37 of TB. But honestly, looking at his wackadoodle life's record- I left out the part where his team lost track of him during one off-season and eventually found him wrestling alligators in a circus- I can't laugh at the guy, because so much of his behavior doesn't seem funny, it seems like a severe case of non-standard neural wiring. Even if nobody recognized that kind of thing at the time.
