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The real 'Rain Man' delivers memorable message
Sunday, July 09, 2000 By Dennis B. Roddy, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Kim Peek, the original Rain Man, hugged his way across Pittsburgh yesterday, dazzling strangers with an elephantine memory and reminding them to do something humankind has heard for millennia but still hasn't memorized: Be kind to each other.
Once clocked with an IQ of 78, later corrected to 168, then finally given a newly invented title, "mega-savant," Peek, a 48-year-old from Murray, Utah, was introduced to the world as Raymond Babbit, the autistic wizard portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 movie "Rain Man."
But Peek, who lived a nearly anonymous life until Hoffman, upon accepting an Academy Award for his portrayal, thanked him by name, is not autistic. Precisely what he is researchers have never fully explained. One team calls him "Kim-puter."
His measureless memory and inexplicable capacity to calculate were on display at Duquesne University yesterday morning, when the Advisory Board on Autism and Related Disorders presented him as exhibit one in its campaign to get the world to accept people who are different.
"What's your birthday?" he asks a visitor. "April 9, 1966? That was a Saturday. You turned 21 on a Wednesday. You were almost a bunny. You missed by one day."
Almost a bunny?
He means April 9, 1966, was one day before Easter -- a feast so moveable, popes have appointed astronomers to calculate its arrival in coming years.
"When's the next time her birthday will be on an Easter, Kim?" his dad, Fran Peek, asks.
Without hesitation, Kim Peek declares, "It won't be that way until 2023."
He has no idea how he does this.
"I see the words. They're visions," he says.
He hugs people. Virtually everyone he can reach -- and by his own count that number reached the 1 million mark during his weekend visit here -- is at risk for a hug.
Peek rubs noses with interviewers, holds hands with strangers in conversation, asks what towns they come from, tells them the ZIP code and names the major streets, then occasionally paces back and forth, sings a song whose title might come to mind from the name of a person or place or some other impenetrable point of reference, laughs, gives a sports score from decades ago, and perhaps notes that the Cathedral of Learning, of which he had only ever heard, is 42 stories tall, or that the first nighttime World Series game was played in Pittsburgh in 1971.
Always, he is right.
He is right when he names the monarchs of England from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth II. He is right when he names not only every state, but its capital city, the date and day of the week it joined the United States. He pours the information into himself at the library, where his left and right eyes read separate pages simultaneously. He keeps them in sequential order, but the massive, single lobe that constitutes his brain is missing the vital piece that, in the rest of us, consigns less momentous stuff to the short-term category. In Kim's brain, everything stays.
"He can't remember what he can't remember," says Fran Peek. "He has no filter."
He also has no means of doing things that the rest of the world uses as touchstones of "normalcy." Born with an unaccountably large brain, later damaged by a large blister of blood in its back, Kim Peek was nearly 4 years old before he could walk. Doctors assumed he was retarded. One recommended a frontal lobotomy. Another suggested he be put in an institution. The family rejected both.
Utah law in the 1960s allowed schools to reject him, and it wasn't until folks noticed that he had memorized the entire index to an encyclopedia that Kim Peek's peculiar genius became apparent. After "Rain Man" made him famous, Utah educators rushed out a high school diploma with honors. A Utah university gave him an honorary doctorate.
But the brain damage has left him unable to comprehend and negotiate such things as the top of a toothpaste tube. He needs help bathing and dressing. He is perpetually gleeful, but unless someone explains it to him, doesn't get a joke. He has logged 480,000 miles of air and auto travel, but balks at riding a downward escalator.
"Kim does not have the ability to reason and have rational thought as we would view it," says Dan Brailer, the ABOARD official who coordinated yesterday's visit.
Much of his conversation is free association that requires a Kim-size memory to follow. As Kim Peek paced about the auditorium stage at Duquesne yesterday, Fran Peek explained how a person once hit Kim with trivia questions about the Kings of England, especially Edward VIII, who abdicated in the 1930s to marry American divorcee Wallace Warfield Simpson.
Did he know what became of Edward's mother, the person asked.
"Yeah," Kim said, "they've got her anchored off Long Beach."
He meant Queen Mary -- the ship.
Fran Peek is 74, and the extent to which he has become the other half of Kim's colossal brain is apparent to all he meets. The elder Peek makes sure his son is clean and dressed, protects him from such slights of the world as he can, and provides the reasoning where Kim churns out bulk fact.
"I worry about what will happen in the future," Fran Peek says. "Like any other parent does."
Until the movie, Kim Peek's social circle was limited to about 20 people. Fran Peek decided to take him out into the world as -- in Brailer's words -- "a message of hope."
Kim Peek ends his appearances reciting -- by memory, how else? -- the words on the business card he carries: "Learning to recognize and to respect differences in others and treating them like you want them to treat you will bring the peace and joy we all hope for."
After that, it's off to a night of casino games at Treesdale Country Club to raise money for the cause of autistic Americans.
Kim, whose character in the movie picked up a small bundle at Las Vegas by playing blackjack, will simply move from table to table chatting with folks.
The real Rain Man can count cards with the best of them. But he refuses to gamble.
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