My Asperger's Syndrome Saved My Life

I may once have had Asperger’s Syndrome, but I no longer have it.  Both because that diagnosis no longer exists and because I’ve worked very hard at addressing the symptoms.  But that’s a story for another post.

The point of this post is that my Asperger’s arguably saved my life.

It happened early in the summer of 1970.  I had just completed my junior year at the University of Detroit and was working full-time as a student assistant at the U-D Library and living in an off-campus flat with five other guys.  One of them (Dave) had just completed his engineering degree and was killing time before going into the Navy in a few weeks.  A friend of his (H. Allen, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan) was visiting us that weekend.

I don’t know whose idea it was, but we decided to drive over to East Lansing to check out the Michigan State University campus.  I drove. We parked and wandered around, ending up at a canoe rental livery.  The guys wanted to go canoeing, but I was hesitant.  I didn’t know how to swim (and I still don’t) and didn’t want to drown on some stupid adventure.  In those less safety-obsessed times, rentals didn’t offer flotation vests or even require the renter to sign any paperwork indemnifying the rental operator.  “Don’t worry about it,” the guys said.  “We won’t fall in.  Even if we did, the water wouldn’t come up to above your waist.  And the canoe will float, so just hang onto it if we tip over.  Which we won’t.”  All of those statements were to prove false.

Against my better judgment, I carefully climbed into the canoe.  Being a novice, I took the middle position and just followed their instructions.  They were in charge of the steering and I simply paddled on command.

It was kind of idyllic, floating down the Red Cedar river through the campus.  The sun was shining, there was a nice breeze, and the scenery was green with bird calling and occasionally making an appearance.

After an hour or so, dusk was approaching.  We decided it was time to turn around and paddle back upstream to the livery.  The sky began to darken.  In the lessened visibility, we somehow found ourselves drifting toward overhanging branches on our left bank.  Reflexively, all three of us leaned to our right.  And apparently that’s not a good thing to do in a canoe.

I found myself underwater, a place I’d spent my 21 years on this planet endeavoring not to be.

 

Okay, I told myself.  Don’t panic.  Just get your feet on the stream bed and stand up.  The water won’t be above your waist.   So I stood up.  And my face was still definitely under water.

Well, they were wrong about that one.  Let’s try squatting down and then jumping up to get your head above water.  That didn’t work, either.  Nor did squatting down, jumping up, and flapping my arms like an enraged chicken.  In the process, though, I tripped over something.  It was the canoe.  So much for their second piece of advice about hanging onto the floating capsized canoe.

Don’t panic, I reminded myself.  The river isn’t all that wide.  You can easily walk to a shore . . . so long as you walk perpendicular to the current and not parallel to it.  But for the life of me, I couldn’t detect any current.  All the river felt to me was wet and totally devoid of air.

My options having dwindled, I tried the last one I could think of.  If I raised my arm high enough, I could feel the breeze.  My hand was clearly above the surface.  And maybe the guys had remembered that I’d made it quite clear that I couldn’t swim.  So that’s what I did.  Raised my arm, waved it back and forth, and began reciting one final Act of Contrition.

And it worked.  A hand grasped my wrist.  Being really desperate for air by this point, I quickly climbed up his body to refill my lungs.  Then I dropped back down.  I remembered that a cousin’s friend had once drowned trying to save a drowning person.  I didn’t want to spook my rescuer (he turned out to be Dave) into abandoning me.

He didn’t.  He walked me over to the bank.  While I calmed own, he went back to dive for and retrieve the canoe.  Meanwhile, H. Allen was calling out, “Don’t worry, Dick.  I’ve got your wallet!”  Apparently, the wallet had gotten out of my hip pocket in the fracas.

We never did find my glasses, though.  So after we returned the canoe, I drove us back to Detroit soggy and semi-blind.

I’d learned various lessons:

• Don’t get into a canoe without a life vest
• Don't count on a canoe floating
• If I somehow find myself in a canoe with another person who's leaning one way, don't lean that same way
• Above all, be careful about being talked into going againt my own judgment 

It wasn’t until decades later that my therapist brought to my attention that what had saved my life hadn’t just been my roommate, Dave. It had been my Asperger’s Syndrome

We Aspies are wired differently than other people are.  Our emotions and our intellect tend to operate on separate circuits.  Autopsies even show evidence of this disconnect.  The corpus callosum (the bundle of nerve fibers connecting the left and right cerebral hemispheres of the brain) of an Aspie contains fewer nerve fibers than does that of a neurotypical person.  People speak of being left-brained or right-brained.  In the case of Aspies, our left-brains and our right-brains aren’t on as good speaking terms with each other as are those of neurotypicals.

 

 

In my case, at least, this means there’s a disconnect between my emotions and my thought processes.  And that’s what saved my life.  Thrown into an emergency situation (actually, tipped would have been a better word), I had been able to set the emotions aside (they clearly weren’t of immediate survival value) and focus my attention on the practical issue of getting myself out of the predicament.  Had the emotions been allowed to compete with the thought processes, panic could have ensued and the outcome could have been bleak.

So in a very real way, I owe my life to the autism spectrum disorder I was born with.  While the case could be made that it’s a disability (after all, the American Psychological Association classifies it as a neurodevelopmental disorder), it also turned out to be a gift.

$5 a Day

A hundred years ago, Henry Ford started a revolution when he doubled down on employee wages. 

On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company announced that the daily wage for qualifying unskilled employees would be raised from $2.34 per day to $5.00.  (Skilled tradesmen already qualified for higher wages than unskilled workers.)  At the same time, the workday was reduced from nine to eight hours.  Detroit was already a high wage town, and Ford’s move pressured his competitors to up their wages or risk losing valuable employees. 

Ford knew what he was doing.  Like his competitors, his company had a high turnover rate among workers doing heavy, monotonous, and sometimes dangerous work that often required extensive training.  Daily absenteeism averaged 10%, and it wasn’t uncommon for a Ford department to go through 300 employees a year to keep 100 positions filled.  Henry suspected the higher wages would increase employee motivation; if it didn’t, it would attract skilled replacement workers who would value their jobs.  Either way, product quality would be boosted.  And reducing the length of the workday actually permitted his plant to operate three shifts rather than two, thereby leveraging the economy of scale that permitted him to sell autos for lower prices than his competitors could afford to.

Ford was also aware that, by raising the incomes of his employees, he also was growing the base for his affordable vehicles.  He reportedly even spoke of the wage move as a form of profit sharing.

The January 5, 1914 announcement reverberated around the world.    The day after the announcement came out, 10,000 applicants showed up at the Highland Park plant.  By the time the new wage was implemented a week later, 12,000 applicants stood in line in the frigid weather.  Thousands of men and families moved to Detroit from the South seeking a better life.  Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island were asking directions to Ford in Detroit

Jobseekers crowd Highland Park plant January 6, 1914

 

Ford’s competitors predictably denounced the move.  The Wall Street Journal called it blatant immorality, writing that it brought “biblical or spiritual principles into a field where they do not belong.” More than one critic called Ford a mad socialist

Henry Ford’s gamble paid off.  Replacement hiring dropped from 53,000 in 1913 to 2,000 after the new wage structure was introduced.  Productivity soared.  Within four years, construction had begun on the mammoth River Rouge complex that would eclipse the Highland Park operation.  By 1921, Ford was producing a million Model T’s each year—ten times the output of its nearest competitor, Chevrolet.  The company’s own employees accounted for a large proportion of the sales.  By 1914, an assembly line worker could buy a car for four month’s pay.  The price of the standard 4 seat open touring car dropped from $850 in 1909 to $440 in 1915.  By the 1920’s, it had fallen to $260.

And the company’s bottom line flourished.  Company profits doubled from $30 million to $60 million between 1914 and 1916.

The Hidden Cost

But there was a hidden cost for the unprecedented wages.  Employees only qualified for the premium $5 wage after they’d been on the payroll for six months.  They also had to pass the scrutiny of Ford’s Sociologicial Department, whose 50 investigators were tasked with enforcing the edict that each worker receiving the premium wage must be “sober, saving, steady, industrious, and must satisfy . . . the staff that his money will not be wasted in riotous living.”  The inspectors were vigilant for drinking, gambling, family abandonment, or other moral offenses both in the workplace and in the home.  Premium workers found to be in violation of the company’s moral standards could find their wages reduced to the $2.34 per day rate.  Repeated violations could result in termination. 

Women employees weren’t eligible for the $5 wage unless they were single and supporting a family; married men didn’t qualify for it if their wives held a job outside the home.

Unfortunately, the improved worker retention limited the need for new employees.  Thousands continued to show up looking for what eventually became only a dozen or two jobs.  Police had to forcibly disperse the crowds, and windows in the Highland Park plant had to be replaced on a frequent basis.

The $5 premium wage marked a tipping point.  “Up to that bold moment in January,” wrote historian Douglas Brinkley in his book Wheels for the World, “no business had ever nodded to the importance of the labor in such a dramatic and costly way. The $5 Day marked, if any one date could, the end of the Gilded Age.”

Whose Idea Was It?

While Henry Ford is generally credited with coming up with the $5/day wage, the idea may have actually originated with James Couzens, the company’s general manager.  Couzens said: “It is our belief that social justice begins at home. We want those who have helped us to produce this great institution and are helping to maintain it to share our prosperity. We want them to have present profits and future prospects. . . .  Believing as we do, that a division of our earnings between capital and labor is unequal, we have sought a plan of relief suitable for our business.”

Couzens eventually had a falling out with Ford (as did many of Ford’s business colleagues), resigning his position in 1915 though he retained a seat on the Board of Directors.  In 1919, Henry Ford bought out Couzens’ shares in the company for $30 million.  (Couzens had gone deep into debt to raise the $2,500 to help found the firm in 1902.)

Couzens would go on to enter politics, serving as Detroit’s mayor from 1919-1922 and representing Michigan in the US Senate from 1922 until his death in 1936.  Ironically, the Senate seat that he was initially appointed to had been vacated by the resignation of Truman Newberry.  Newberry had won the seat in 1918 over the Democratic candidate . . . Henry Ford, who had been personally asked to run for the seat by President Woodrow Wilson.  Ford lost the 1918 race when he refused to finance his own campaign.  Newberry spent an estimated $190,000 on his campaign and narrowly won.

 

James Couzens
(1872-1936)

My Banned Book

Like most librarians (and most non-librarians of my acquaintance), I’m not a big fan of censorship.  Unless there are really vile exigent circumstances, I prefer to choose my own reading, viewing, and listening material rather than have Big Brother in some guise pre-determine what’s not good for me.

The American Library Association’s Banned Book Week having just concluded (they’re against banning rather than for it), I heard a story on The Takeaway a few days ago about book banning in libraries and schools.  That made me recall an incident from when I was attending the School of Library and Information Studies at Wayne State University over 30 years ago.

And about the time I got a book removed from a library's collection.

I was taking a class in collection development—how to build and maintain a library’s collection so as to best fulfill the institution’s mission statement while adhering to the budget.  The instructor (Edith Phillips, if I remember correctly) gave us an interesting assignment.   We were to imagine ourselves as directors of public libraries.  An upset patron had come to us demanding that a particular book be withdrawn from the collection.  Each of us was to choose a controversial book and then write a paper explaining how we’d handle the situation, balancing our professional standards and personal dedication to the First Amendment against the standards of the community (as if those could actually be determined).

This being very early in the 1980’s most of my fellow students (women—I was always in the minority in my classes . . . and in my workplaces) chose the 1971 classic, Our Bodies, Ourselves.   I’d never read it, but I assumed it to be along the lines of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive:  A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot (another best-seller of the same period) only with a different focus.  Seriously, I knew that the women’s health book was highly controversial.  And I’m pretty sure that all the women argued against banning the book.

I chose a different approach.  Years earlier, I’d been a part-time student assistant in a university library (not Wayne State University) with closed stacks.  When we weren’t paging books requested patrons, we reshelved returned books.  And when we were caught up on that, we were supposed to perform shelf reading—working our way through the collection shelf-by-shelf to make sure no books had been misshelved.  (It was even more boring than it sounds.)  While shelf reading, I ran across a truly disturbing book.

Take Your Choice:  Segregation or Mongrelization was a racist polemic by a guy named Theodore Bilbo.  He’d served two non-sequential terms as governor of Mississippi and then a single term in the U.S. Senate.  Those were his qualifications for opining on the issue of segregation.  I’d never seen anything like it.  I found it irresistible in a repugnant sense, like a terrible traffic accident you can’t take your eyes off.  I smuggled it home (I wasn’t about to let anyone see me checking it out), read it cover to cover, and smuggled it back in.

Mr. Bilbo purported that the book was an objective look at the issue, even quoting from published sources.  Well, actually all of quotes were from the same source—a self-published book by another racist crackpot.  Bilbo’s basic thesis was that the colored folk were happy in their assigned place and so were the white folk in their assigned place.  That’s the way that God set it up, and Mississippi wasn’t going to mess with God’s Divine Plan so long as he (Bilbo, not God) was in charge.

Having received the assignment from Dr. Phillips, I returned to those closed stacks (I had connections).  The vile book was still there.  They’d installed a theft detection system since my previous escapade smuggling it into and out of the building, but I knew how to beat it.  (No, I won’t tell you . . . librarians have professional secrets, just like magicians do.)  Taking it home, I re-read it. It was every bit as appalling as I remembered it being.

 

When I wrote up my paper, I fully endorsed removing Take Your Choice:  Segregation or Mongrelization from the imaginary collection I supervised as pretend library director.  The subject matter wasn’t the issue.  My main reason for agreeing to remove the book was that it contained demonstrably fraudulent information that purported to document the genetic inferiority of blacks to whites.   Had the book used similarly false documentation to prove the contention that the earth is flat, I similarly would have acceded to a patron request to withdraw it even though the flat earth theory is hardly a burning controversy.  Furthermore, there were practical risks in keeping the book in the collection.  Had someone with an ax to pick against my imaginary library somehow run across it, they’d have had a perfect gallows from which to hang me and my library.

When I turned in the paper, I clipped it to the book.  Not only did I get an A on the paper, Dr. Phillips had me read it to the class to demonstrate that there are situations in which removing a book from a collection can be justified.

Finally, I returned to the library from which I had smuggled out the book.  Disregarding the alarm that went off when I entered the building (“It’s okay—I’m smuggling your book back in rather than out”), I walked back to the Director’s office.  I knew her personally (we used to play pinochle with mutual friends some weekends), so I thought the book should be brought to her attention.  I dropped it on her desk and gave her the short version of my story.

The next time I visited that library, I checked the catalog.  The book had been withdrawn from the collection.

 

Postscript:  So much for relying on my memory of events thirty years in the past.  The library director cited in the post has contacted me to point out two facts:

1. The stacks were no longer closed when I returned to the library to retrieve the book for my library studies assignment.
2. She has never engaged in censorship,

My first error was semi-intentional.  Even as I wrote the post, I was trying to remember when the stacks had been opened to the public.  Despite my uncertainty, I succumbed to the temptation to embellish the story.  (And I did know how to beat the theft detection system originally installed in that library.

The second error was the result of a false memory on my part.  I just checked their online catalog (as I should have when I writing the post), and the book is still in their collection.  I owe the director an amends for implying that she would have removed an objectionable book as the result of a patron complaint.  (For that matter, I never actually complained or requested that the book be withdrawn.)  Censorship is a slippery slope to venture out on.  The case can certainly be made that there's historical value in retaining artifacts of an earlier time even when they've become controversial.  It may be difficult for a college student of the early Twenty First Century to believe that a governor and senator would ever publish anything as insensitive and potentially incendiary as that book was. 

So I hereby apologize to said director for my error.  She is a woman of principle whom I've long admired.  I was wrong, and I thank her for correcting my mistake.
 

Detroit's Elephant Man

Years ago, I knew the Elephant Man.

No, he didn’t have a horrible disfiguring medical condition like John Merrick was portrayed as having in Victorian London in the 1980 Oscar winning film, The Elephant Man.  Instead, he was obsessed with elephants.  Their anatomy.  Their physiology.  And above all, their behavior.

I came to know Jeheskal Shoshani (but everyone called him Hezy) when I worked at Wayne State University’s Science and Engineering Library from 1979-1985.  My main responsibility was document delivery and interlibrary loan—obtaining from other libraries the books and periodical articles that WSU grad students and faculty needed but which were lacking from our own collection.  And this friendly guy with a gray, grizzled beard kept on requesting literature about elephants.  Not just recent stuff, but publications from the early 19^th Century and even earlier.

Over time, I got to know Hezy.  He was an Israeli who had somehow found himself pursuing a PhD. in evolutionary biology in Detroit.  And he wanted to know everything about elephants.  Reputedly, he had grown fascinated with the creatures while employed as an elephant keeper at the Tel Aviv Zoo.  I knew for a fact that he founded and published Elephant, the world’s only periodical devoted entirely to that subject.  And his fame had grown to the point that he was approached as a subject authority in the formulation of answers to two questions for television’s Hollywood Squares quiz program.  The questions were:

1. How much can an elephant can pee in one session; and
2. How high is the elephant’s eye that’s alluded to in the title song of the musical, Oklahoma.

I don't remember the answer to either question.  Nor did Hezy, until he took extensive measurements.

But it wasn’t until after I left WSU in 1985 that Hezy embarked on perhaps his most famous adventure.  After determining that it had been well over a century since the most recent full-scale dissection of an elephant, he decided that it was time to dissect another one.  Surely advances in technology and technique would lead to more knowledge about elephant anatomy.

That posed a problem.  One can’t simply order a preserved elephant corpse from a scientific supply house the way one can a fetal pig or a dozen frogs.  So Hezy turned to the network of contacts he’d built up over the years with elephant keepers at US and Canadian zoos and circuses.  He began closely tracking the health of elderly and/or ailing elephants throughout North America.

Eventually, he got the good news (good for him, not so good for the elephant) that an elephant had passed away at Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey winter quarters in Sarasota, FL.  “Don’t bury the body,” Hezy told them by phone.  “I’ll take it.”

Legend has it that McDonald’s reneged on an earlier promise to loan him a refrigerated truck whenever a dead elephant became available, but that sounds like an urban legend to me..  All I know is that Hezy and a colleague grabbed a plane from Detroit to Sarasota and then caught a cab to a U-Haul franchise.  It turned out that U-Haul didn’t rent out refrigerated trucks, so they rented the biggest truck available and drove to the circus grounds.

Loading the elephant corpse into the back of the truck turned out to be more difficult than they had anticipated.  They ultimately had to remove the head and have the forklift load first the remaining body and then the head into the truck.  (Not having brought his dissection instruments, Hezy had to borrow a chain saw to perform the decapitation.)

Then they made their way to northbound I-75 and put the pedal to the metal.  This was Florida in the summer, and they were carrying a multi-ton load of fresh meat.  They only got pulled over once, when an Alabama state trooper asked them what their rush was.  “We’ve got a dead elephant in the back that we need to get into a refrigerated lab in Detroit ASAP,” Hezy replied.  After the skeptical trooper confirmed the story (yes, that was a dead elephant in the back of the truck), he let them off with a warning to keep to somewhere near the posted speed limit for the remainder of their trip through Alabama.  After that, they would be in someone else’s jurisdiction.

I can’t say how long it took them to drive the 1,232 miles to Detroit, but I’m willing to bet it was less than the 20 hours that Google Maps says the trip should take.  After successfully offloading the elephant's body and head into the refrigerated lab that WSU had reserved for Hezy’s project, it was time to scrub out the rental truck and return it to a local U-Haul franchise. No word on how they explained what must have been a interesting lingering odor.

The dissection went well.  Hezy and his cohorts took their time and did a thorough job.  Among other things, they counted 148,198 fascicles (tiny muscle bundles) that give elephants such precise control over their trunks.

Today, there’s an exhibit in the lobby of the Science Library where I used to work that documents the project.

 

Unfortunately, the Science and Engineering Library was permanently closed in August, 2013.  No word on whether the exhibit will be moved.

After finally earning his Ph.D. at WSU, Hezy settled permanently in the metro Detroit area.  Marrying another elephant enthusiast named Sandra, he joined the faculty of the Biology Department of Oakland Community College in Detroit’s northern suburbs.   When a crew from the Oakland County Road Commission unearthed some large bones in Rochester Hills, Hezy and his students excavated the mastodon remains. 

But there wasn’t much opportunity for fieldwork in Oakland County, especially after the Detroit Zoo decided in 2004 to send their two elephants (Wanda and Winky) to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee so that they could spend their remaining years in more natural conditions.

He was able to spend some of his summers on the faculty of the University of Asmara in Eritrea and performing research funded by the Born Free Foundation in the United Kingdom.  And then he moved on to Addis Ababa University in 2007, teaching and studying the same group of elephants who migrate seasonally between the two countries.

That’s where Hezy was when he met an untimely end on May 20^th, 2008.  He was one of the victims of a public minibus bombing by terrorists in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 



The Elephant Research Foundation that Hezy founded in 1977 survives him, as does the Jeheskel (Hezy) Shoshani Library Endowed Collection that’s housed in the WSU Science Library.  During his career, Hezy published nearly 200 scientific papers and edited one popular book (Elephants: Majestic Creaturesof the Wild [New York:  Checkmark Books, 2000]) and coedited a technical volume (The Proboscidea:  Evolution and Palaeoecology of Elephants andTheir Relatives [London:  Oxford University Press, 1996]).



I’ve learned a little about elephants over the years.  We know that they’re highly intelligent and social creatures.  They’re able to communicate across distances measured in many miles by subsonic vocalizations that are undetectable to the human ear.

I like to think that's how word of Hezy’s demise spread from one elephant to another throughout Africa.

           Hezy’s dead.

           No!  What happened?

           Did something happen to Hezy?

           That’s so sad.  He was such a kind man.

I further like to think that his pachyderm pals arranged a memorial service for him.  Imagine a pre-ordained time when every elephant around the world stopped in his tracks, paused for a moment of silence, and then raised his or her trunk and sounded a mournful trumpet.

Rest in peace, Hezy.  You're not forgotten.

 

The Original Jackson Prison

One of the first agenda items when Michigan became the 26^th state in 1837 was the establishment of a state prison.  When the state sought a location for the new facility, bids were received from numerous cities including Ann Arbor, Jackson, and Kalamazoo.  Even in those early days, communities saw employment and other economic advantages in housing a prison.

The state ultimately settled on Jackson for the site.  Jackson County was the most centrally situated of the state’s 14 counties (which, according to the first census of Michigan, collectively housed roughly 60,000 residents; that number would climb to 212,000 by the 1840 Federal Census).
 
Funds were allocated for the construction of a temporary prison, which opened in 1839.  It was constructed of tamarack logs.

(These and other painted Illustrations are from murals painted within the original stone prison by residents of the artist’s colony which now occupies one of the structures)

The wooden structure was intended to house prisoners while their labor was being used to construct a more secure and permanent facility from stone quarried from the area and barged down the Grand River, which ran near the site.  Indeed, a party of 12 inmates escaped from the wooden structure during its brief existence.  Widely known as The Jackson Gang, the escapees preyed on residents of the community for years.

 

The new stone structure that opened in 1842 proved less porous than the wooden stockade had been.  Over time, additional buildings were constructed to house the burgeoning population.  Inmates led a bleak life, locked each night in 4’x5’ cells within a drafty structure that lacked heating, ventilation, and plumbing (each prisoner was provided with a bucket into which to do his business).  The ventilation was so bad that caged canaries were hung in the corridors between the cellblocks.  If a guard noticed that a canary had toppled from its perch, he was advised to release the prisoners into the yard to get some fresh air.   But even in the yard, the prisoners were confined by 16’ stone walls with occasional guard towers staffed with armed guards with orders to shoot any attempted escapists.  

Guards travelled between the cellblock buildings and the towers through 4’ high underground tunnels that periodically rose to a height of 5-½’ to allow the hunched over staff to periodically almost stand up.

(Imagine the tunnels without the recently added infrastructure renovations)

While the cells were bleak, they were plush compared to The Hole—the disciplinary cell into which problematic prisoners were placed.   Shut off by solid steel doors with a slot through which meals were delivered, inmates in The Hole lived in permanent darkness.  They were told to do their sanitary business using a trough which ran around the perimeter of the cell.  Under the regime of one of the early superintendents, new inmates were greeted with an initial 14 day stay in The Hole to impress upon them the importance of abiding by the discipline imposed upon them.   That discipline included the Code of Silence.  Any prisoner caught speaking aloud to—to another prisoner, to a guard (unless the guard initiated the conversation), or even to himself—could find himself in The Hole.

Meanwhile, the prison presented to the surrounding community was more welcoming.  On frequent occasions, the public was invited within the walls to participate in special events.

 (The mural illustrates a watermelon festival held in the prison)

The 5-story tower in the illustration housed the areas where lawyers were permitted to meet with their inmate clients, as well as the primitive medical facility available to inmate, and a separate area later used to conduct classes for cooperative inmates who hoped to pursue a more productive career upon release.  The warden and his family lived on the third and fourth floors.  Guards and other prison staff resided outside the walls.

While the state’s handful of women prisoners were originally housed in the Jackson facility, it was clear that imprisoning men and women in the same facility wasn’t going to turn out well. The women inmates were moved to a separate facility elsewhere in Michigan in 1859. All but one. Serving a life sentence, she (who, in all likelihood didn’t remotely resemble the muralist’s rendering of her) remained at the Jackson Prison until the warden persuaded the Governor to commute her sentence at the age of 80 so she could spend her remaining years living with her daughter outside the walls. But during most of her incarceration, she did the cooking and housekeeping for the warden and his family and babysat the children on the rare occasions that he and his wife had a social commitment outside the walls. Apparently, nobody bothered to determine the crime that had earned her that life sentence—poisoning three of her own children.

Disclaimer:  Doubts have been raised about the authenticity of the muralist's
depiction of the prison's last woman prisoner.

 
Trusted and athletic prisoners were sometimes permitted to participate in these events, and a prison baseball team was even formed.  (Guards accompanied the team to away games.)

From the start, the prison was intended to be self-sufficient.   A farm was established within the walls.  Over time, additional industries were created and factories constructed within the walls.  Bricks, soap, clothing, brooms, and brushes were made for sale in the wider world, as were gravestones and monuments.  In 1918, prisoners began manufacturing license plates for horseless carriages that were becoming increasingly popular in Michigan.

All of that manufacturing required transportation to the market, and largely because of the prison industries the city of Jackson came to have six different railroad lines leading into it.  A separate spur permitted trains entry through the wall, and even into some of the prison buildings.  Buildings and the surrounding walls were retrofitted,

(Above:  Train portal through the outer walls;
Below:  Train portal into a prison factory which
has been rehabbed to house artists' studios)

Through a state agent, inmates were also contracted by local farmers and industrialists as cheap labor.  Prison labor was originally priced at 33½ cents per day (not per hour), with 28½ cents of that wage going to the state to cover the prison’s cost in housing and feeding him.  The remaining 5 cents was set aside to establish a grubstake for the prisoner upon his release.   Working under contracts that typically lasted five years, the prison built rent-free shops for manufacturers to use.   Prisoners working outside the walls were shackled during their walk to and from the prison and were under the supervision of armed prison guards while at work.

One of the most prominent employers of Jackson prisoners was the Austin, Tomlinson & Webster Manufacturing Co., which began making farm wagons in 1842.  The company’s Jackson Wagons achieved national prominence for their durability and reliability.  At the company’s peak, it was producing over 6,000 wagons annually, ranging from small ones designed to be pulled by a goat to huge ones requiring teams of oxen.  They proved to be the top-selling wagon among settlers heading west for the Gold Rush.  Perhaps their most famous customer was P. T. Barnum, who contracted with them to build a wagon big and strong enough to transport Jumbo (the elephant who allegedly was 10’ tall and weighed 6½ tons) in circus parades after his arthritic knees could no longer handle the walking.

But not all of the prisoners were happy campers.  After a disgruntled prisoner set a fire in 1852 that destroyed several of the company’s buildings, the company and other contractors began paying inmate workers bonuses which served as an incentive (AKA bribe) to perform more reliably.  The practice ensured smooth operation for 15 years until a state investigation barred the bonus practice as not punishing prisoners sufficiently.  Within a month of the ban, “accidental” fires caused over $100,000 of damage to contractors’ workshops.

Moving to the New Prison

 

While additions were periodically added to the prison to accommodate its growing population, it became clear over time that a new facility would be needed.  In 1924, construction began (by contractors this time, not prison laborers) of a modern prison (i.e., incorporating electricity, plumbing, and heating) on a patch of nearly 3,500 acres in nearby Blackman Township.  34 foot walls enclosed an area of 57 acres containing 16 free-standing cell blocks collectively comprising 5,742 10’ x 6’ cells.   While the cell blocks were windowless, the cells within each block were arranged on 5 levels surrounding a central dining area on the first floor.  Walls between cells were solid, but the front and back walls of each cell were barred.  Jail maintenance staff could access each cell’s plumbing and electrical circuits from a hallway that ran between the back of the cell and the cell block wall.

Starting in 1926, inmates of the old facility were slowly migrated over to the new one.  Since the structures were only three miles apart, groups of prisoners were shackled together and marched to the new prison by guards.  

The prisoners were undoubtedly pleased (well, as pleased as an involuntary guest of the Michigan Department of Corrections is likely to become) to be housed in better accommodations, but controversy arose when the warden announced plans to destroy the canaries that had provided alerts to dangerous gases in the old prison.  The long-term prisoners had grown attached to the birds and complained that there was no need to destroy the innocent creatures.  The warden finally relented and agreed to free the canaries once the original prison had closed.  Ironically, prison management had fed the birds better than it had the inmates.  The birds had subsisted on high quality Hartz Mountain songbird feed—a blend of various seeds.  Once the birds had been released, it became obvious that one of the sources of seeds in the blend had been the Cannabis plant.  Undigested seeds passed through the gut of the freed canaries resulted in the Jackson area having an exceptionally luxuriant population of wild marijuana.

By 1934, all the prisoners had been moved.  After the cells had been torn out of one cellblock, a hardwood floor was installed and the building was repurposed as a National Guard armory. Unique electric chandeliers were created from the huge wheels on the carriages that moved Civil War cannons.  Eventually, a dedicated armory was built, and the original facility was once again vacant.

 

Repurposing the Old Prison

Eventually, someone figured out what to do with the site. More than $8 million has been raised from foundations, donors, tax credits, a federal home loan, and community development block grants to convert an abandoned cellblock and one of the dormant factories within the 25-foot wall to art studios, a gallery, and 62 one, two-, and three-bedroom apartments, many featuring 18-foot ceilings.  Occupancy is limited to working artists, and the mixture of dancers, painters, sculptors, poets, writers, and others who began moving in early in 2008 make for a lively bunch.  (They report that the three foot thick stone walls keep their apartments cool in the summer and warm in the winter.)   A series of small shops offer visitors an opportunity to purchase works produced by the residents.

Additional funding promises the conversion of additional space into 88 townhouse units for senior citizens.

Armory Arts Village resident and master storyteller Judy Krasnow was drawn to the development when she first heard of it and became one of the first residents when she moved up from Florida.  Intrigued by the setting, Krasnow began researching the history of the old prison.  Working with current and former prison guards in the Jackson area, she found all of fascinating information.  She began arranging guided public tours of the facility, together with visits to the studios of some of the artists in residence.  When I took the tour a cousin and her husband in August, 2012, we had the opportunity to visit the studios of woodcarver Carol A. Kent and acrylic painter and woodburner Lou Cubille. 

(Above, woodcarver Carol A. Kent with a casting of one of her carvings.
Below:  Other than the eyes [acrylic paint], Lou Cabille's wolf
was produced solely by woodburning)

 

Krasnow had also arranged a contract with the Michigan Department of Corrections which allowed our guide and us a glimpse into the real, working prison down the road from the original one. 

After the federal government ruled that the sheer size of the new facility inherently led to inhumane conditions, eight of the sixteen cellblocks were shuttered.  The closed cellblock that we were permitted to visit had been the reception center.  Every prisoner entering the custody of MDOC initially resided in that structure during a quarantine period (for health reasons) and while the determination was made where to house them within the Jackson complex.  Some areas of the complex were medium security, while others were high or even maximum security. 

Cameras were not permitted during this portion of our tour, but the reality of seeing five floors of barred cells was sobering.  When our guides pushed the button to open or close the sliding doors of a dozen cells at a time, the sound was eerie.

The End of the Line for Prisoners

The tour ended after we were returned to the old prison to visit the gift shop.  Marilyn, Dick, and I, however, didn’t want it to end.   We checked with our guide and learned that prisoners who died in either the old or the new prison and whose bodies went unclaimed were buried in the prison plot of nearby Woodland Cemetery.  We found a bleak scene. 

The tombstones reflected the bleak and anonymous nature of a lifer’s prison life.  Most were marked only with sequential numbers reflecting the order in which burials had occurred. 

 

On occasion, loved ones would pay for a more personalized marker reflecting the date of death.  Even these, though, lacked the prisoner’s name. 

 

It was as though the individual’s identity had entirely faded away during his time within the walls. 

Eventually, even the tombstone might cease to exist.

 

 

 

 

Booking Your Own Tour

As I write this, the 2012 tour season has ended.  Judy and her crew will certainly resume and maybe even expand them.  The historicprisontoursjackson.com site seems to have gone dark, but that’s probably only a temporary glitch.  In addition to the regular daytime tours, they also offer a limited number of evening events during which visitors can determine whether or not the place is haunted.

E-mail historicprisontoursjackson@gmail.com for more information.

 

(Left:  Marilyn  (my cousin) & Dick Ludman in front of the wall surrounding the old prison.
Right:  Marilyn with a cutout of tour originator Judy Krasner re-enacting Temperance activist Carrie Nation)