![]() The Oscar was indefinitely loaned to Kim by Barry Morrow, the screenwriter for “Rain Man.” The award accompanied Kim to all of his public appearances, eventually being so loved the gold plating started to wear away. One of Kim’s favorite things to do was to bring in his Oscar statuette and have people heft it. He then gave the exact address for a Harold Reynolds who lived in the Avenues neighborhood of Salt Lake City. Once he approached a librarian behind the desk. “It was an all-hands-on-deck” situation, Cherie Willis, a librarian who knew Kim, recalled. Occasionally he would misplace his eyeglasses. To see Kim in the Salt Lake City library was about the furthest thing from the doctor’s prognosis. He should be put in an institution and forgotten. His conclusion: He’ll never be able to learn or walk. The neurologist the Peeks visited after Kim’s birth was late for a golf game and only gave them five minutes of his time. ![]() ![]() Reading the encyclopedia at any pre-kindergarten age is unusual, but it’s all the more remarkable for Kim, who, not long after he was born, was written off as severely handicapped. It was Kim who responded, “Well, I know the alphabet.” “How does he know alphabetical order?” Fran asked his wife. By the time he was 3 years old, Fran said, he could look up words in the dictionary. When interviewed about Kim, his father, Fran, maintained he had no idea how his son learned to read but that it started once Kim was strong enough to pull the encyclopedias off of the family bookcase. You could tell he was finished reading something because he would place it upside down, just as he had since he started reading as a child. Lists especially seemed to capture Kim’s attention, although his repertory consisted of everything from Shakespeare to Latter-day Saint scripture, which he memorized in its entirety. He spent hours at a time perusing the shelves, perhaps cracking open city directories and scanning the left page with his left eye while simultaneously reading the opposite page with his right eye. Kim Peek lived in Murray, Utah, but it was the public library eight miles to the north that might as well have been his true home. Now it’s entirely plausible that society wakes up to a future in which it eliminates the very thing that made Kim Peek, and so many other neurologically diverse people, truly remarkable. Kim was born in 1951, five years before ultrasound examinations were first used in a clinical setting. Prenatal testing for disorders and birth defects is increasingly common, as is the choice to end prenatal life based on the test results. Advancements in genome editing technology are knocking at the door of an ethically fraught future. Reflection on the intervening years suggests that we forget the legacy of Kim’s neurological gifts and distinctiveness at our own risk. Those gatherings ended more than a decade ago when Kim died of a heart attack. For a man with severe social roadblocks, it seemed that this was his way of conversing with the world around him. The technicalities didn’t matter, though, when Kim was in front of strangers, charming them with his warmhearted mannerisms as he did that day in Oxford, more than 15 years ago. Scientists could visually understand his abnormalities - Kim’s brain was missing the fibers that link the left and right hemispheres, among other deformities - but there weren’t concrete answers as to how the oddities led to Kim’s superhuman abilities. He couldn’t button his shirt, but he learned to play the piano with both hands in his later years. He had an IQ of 87 but was reading and comprehending books as early as 16 months old, eventually memorizing an estimated 12,000 books in his lifetime. Yet, his mind was in many ways an unsolved riddle. Whereas most people with savant syndrome have one or two subject areas of expertise, Kim had 15. You could give him a birthdate and he would tell you on which day of the week you were born and on which day it would fall this year. He could tell you the zip code for any city in the United States. Kim Peek - better known to some as the inspiration for the Oscar-winning, 1988 Dustin Hoffman film “Rain Man” - was both mystery and marvel. “In British history, who was the only prime minister to be assassinated?”Īnd on it went, just like it had thousands of times for millions of strangers who would flock to witness one of the world’s most complex savants publicly flex his encyclopedic genius in the final decades of his life. Peek answers in an instant: May 7, 1915, adding that it was a Friday.
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