To the world he changed, he was Bernard Rimland, PhD. To his friends, he was “Bernie.” Bernie’s doctorate was in the right field for someone with something to say about autism: psychology. He also had a son with autism, and, like Ruth Sullivan, his future partner-in-arms, he had a passion for organizing. Without a doubt, if the community of autism parents had been a church, they would have made Rimland their first saint.
Except that he was Jewish, so sainthood might not have sat very well on his shoulders. Then again, later in life, when he had grown a big, Santa Claus–sized beard, he was famously happy to put on the red suit at Christmastime and hand out toys at the office party, where parents were welcome to bring in their autistic kids.
Bernie’s own parents were immigrants from Russia who met in Cleveland and tried to make a go of it there. Neither of them could read or write—not even in their native Russian—but his father had learned metalworking, and as World War II broke out, he moved the family to San Diego, California, where he got work in the warplane factories. Bernie, even as a young teenager, was contributing to the family finances. Starting at age fourteen, Bernie could be seen streaking by bicycle downtown into San Diego’s Gaslight District every afternoon after school, where he started to work as a locksmith’s assistant. Within a few years, still a teenager, he was a locksmith in his own right. He had a mind for systems and a curiosity about how their parts worked together.
He enrolled at San Diego State University, ignoring his parents’ view of college as an unnecessary frill. This was where he discovered psychology, which seemed to fascinate that same part of his mind that liked taking locks apart. The internal workings of personality and the tools that had been designed to test and measure it—it was just like locks and keys, but on a higher plane. He went on to earn the school’s first-ever master’s degree in psychology.
Three years later, at Penn State, Rimland collected his PhD in experimental psychology; then he returned to San Diego to begin the job he would keep for the next thirty-two years. The Defense Department had just opened the Naval Personnel Research and Development Center, whose team of largely civilian social scientists was tasked with exploiting psychology to identify and address problematic military behaviors, with a heavy emphasis on psychological testing and data analysis.
Rimland was a prolific producer of data in the program, as he traveled to military bases all over the country to conduct research and published dozens of papers. It was a good period in his life, with all its parts in balance. He had married a woman, Gloria, whom he had known since they were children living in the same San Diego neighborhood. Bernie’s job with the navy was secure, his income was steady, and his marriage was happy. As he turned twenty-eight, the only piece missing was fatherhood. Then, in 1956, when Gloria gave birth to their son Mark, that piece fell into place as well.
It would always strike Rimland afterward how, on the one hand, Mark was “a perfectly normal-looking infant,” and on the other, how clearly he could see that there was “something dramatically wrong with him.” He was walking at eight months, and speaking in full sentences at one year, very early for both of these milestones. But Mark never spoke to anyone, and he never said “Mommy” or “Daddy.” From the start, he had cried inconsolably, been almost impossible to nurse, and went stiff against the hands of both his parents—all signs of a condition that their pediatrician, despite thirty-five years in practice, did not recognize as autism. Neither, for that matter, did Rimland, who, despite his PhD, could later say with certainty that he had never even heard the word at that point.
It was Gloria who had the first flash of insight that Mark’s behaviors might have a name. While she was watching him one day, a faint memory reached her, a recollection of taking a psychology course in college, where the case of a strange child had come up—a boy who was endlessly restless, usually inconsolable, and whose language seemed disconnected from any actual intention to communicate.
When she mentioned this to Bernie, he headed straight for the garage, where they kept all their old schoolbooks. He opened a lot of boxes that day, flipping through every book with the word “psychology” on the spine, scanning for the case Gloria thought she remembered. When he finally returned to the house, he had one of the books with him, a particular page bookmarked by his thumb. “Autism,” he said to Gloria. “It’s called autism.”
IN RIMLAND’S MIND, the diagnosis was less an answer than a question he would spend the rest of his life pursuing. Autism, this rare condition: what caused it, and—even more important to him—what would make it go away? With his two-year-old’s future hanging in the balance, he headed to the library to see what more he could learn. Gloria’s textbook had made it clear that the condition was extremely rare, so it was likely that its causes would be thinly researched and quite possibly unknown. To his surprise, however, the first few articles he found told him that the origin of his son Mark’s autism was well established. His wife, Gloria, had caused it.
Like Ruth Sullivan, Rimland never bought it—not for a moment. He couldn’t, not when he immediately saw two compelling reasons for finding the idea preposterous. One was the data—specifically, the lack of it. He was a numbers man, and he could see that no one writing about refrigerator mothers was actually offering any sort of scientific or statistical backup for it. The level of scholarship on this, he was shocked to see, was abysmal.
The other reason was Gloria herself. Bernie had seen her with Mark, how carefully she tended to him, how gently she worked with him. Besides, Mark’s odd fit into the world had been obvious from birth. He had seen that too, and he had watched Gloria work to adjust to Mark’s distinct ways.
So as he pondered what these books and articles on autism were saying about her, he felt himself getting angry. It wasn’t just the baselessness of the refrigerator theory. It was the insult of it. These people—Bettelheim and his colleagues—were falsely accusing his own wife, this marvelous woman who had been giving up everything just to keep up with the challenge of Mark, of causing his autism. Over the next days and weeks, this ire chewed on him.
But at the same time, it awakened something in him: a resolve to clear Gloria’s name, and that of all the other mothers so ridiculously and scandalously accused. In the coming years, the quiet, clean-cut, bookish man he had always been—just Bernie—would be replaced, little by little, by Rimland, the man with the big beard, the dominating presence, and the uncompromising personality: the agitator, the advocate, and the instigator.
Rimland always thought of autism itself as his primary enemy, as a foreign entity that needed to be defeated. But his war against autism necessitated a campaign against conventional thinking and those who espoused it.
In the beginning, this meant taking on the denizens of the psychiatric profession who saw mothers as the cause of autism. But in order to prove them wrong, he would need ammunition.
In 1958, Rimland set out to get his hands on every published report, every study, every case history in existence that even hinted at autism. He did this at night, on weekends, and between giving IQ tests to sailors while he was traveling. The information he needed was scattered all over the place in various books, journals, and libraries around the United States. As much as he could, he went to these places himself, relying on his handwritten notes and his own near-photographic memory, because photocopying was prohibitively expensive.
Rimland also wrote letters to investigators he could not meet in person, mailing them off to New York, London, and Amsterdam, soliciting details on their unpublished cases and seeking leads to other write-ups by other researchers that he might have overlooked. No one had done this before—pulled together all the reported cases of autism to create and analyze a profile of this little-known condition. He devoted more than two years to this search, until he was convinced there probably was not a single reported case of autism out there that he had missed. Altogether, he found somewhere in the region of 230 cases written up in some detail. Then he started reading.
Rimland’s goal was to produce a document that would examine the refrigerator-mother theory as scientifically as possible. If the theory held up, he would admit it. But if, on the other hand, the evidence was weak or lacking, then he would go on the attack.
It was not even a close call. As soon as Rimland began teasing out a few basic facts about the world’s known population of autistic children, the mother-blaming concept completely collapsed. This started with his discovery that nearly every mother raising a child with autism was also bringing up children who did not have the condition. It made no sense that these women, presumed to be more poisonous than wasps, would only sting once.
Rimland also noted the complete failure of psychotherapy to make autism disappear. Presumably, an illness that was psychogenic in origin would yield to such treatment. The attempt had been made several times, Rimland found, and always with dismal results. In one group of 42 children, the 29 who underwent a supposedly high-quality cycle of psychotherapy showed no progress at all. They “went nowhere,” according to the study Rimland read. The remaining 13 children had received either inadequate therapy or none at all. Ironically, only some children in this second group made enough progress to start school.
The refrigerator-mother theory presumed that some sort of trauma had occurred early in the life of the child. This might include the birth of a sibling, a stay in the hospital, or the absence of a parent. But there was no pattern of such inciting events in the lives of the 230 children he had read about. On the flip side, neither could Rimland find evidence of children who had acquired autism as a result of such events occurring early in their lives. He also found that the much-reported observation that parents of autistic children were cold, distant, and self-absorbed personalities did not apply to at least twenty-three of the families in his database, who were described as noticeably warm, vivid personalities.
As for the mothers observed handling their child with uncertainty in a doctor’s office or answering a clinician’s questions in a voice that sounded flat and spiritless, Rimland reasoned that these behaviors, taken as evidence of “coldness,” could just as plausibly have been the result of exhaustion and confusion, a result of the child’s seeming indifference to his mother’s loving words and touches.
Yet another possibility that occurred to Rimland was that the behaviors observed in parents might be clues to a genetic component to autism. Perhaps both parent and child were manifesting variations of the same underlying predisposition, inborn in both, passed down from parent to child as a matter of inheritance. Or perhaps, if not strictly genetic, it could be the result of something in the environment acting upon both parent and child with differing severity.
At bottom, Rimland’s database was throwing off all sorts of clues that autism might be rooted in the human organism itself, and none to suggest that bad mothering had anything to do with it. He was sure that the psyche was beside the point, and that autism was biology.
Knowing he was getting out of his depth, the experimental psychologist went back to reading, and began to teach himself genetics, biochemistry, neurophysiology, nutrition, and child psychology, which he had specifically avoided in graduate school, because he never saw it coming in handy for the career he had planned. To reassure himself, perhaps, that he was not wandering too far off course himself, he decided to start running his ideas by a noted expert in the field: Leo Kanner.
Rimland started writing to Kanner at least as early as 1960, with a deference befitting the situation. Rimland was a young, unknown experimenter with a lot of questions he wanted to ask. Kanner was the world’s leading child psychologist, Berlin-trained, with four decades in practice and a condition named after him in the textbooks. Indeed, in his earliest letters, Rimland was downright fawning. “Only Churchill comes to mind when I think of writers,” he wrote of Kanner’s scholarly prose, “whose…rhetoric demonstrate[s] similar mastery.”
The flattery worked. Kanner clearly read Rimland’s letters closely, as well as at least one “brief paper presenting my findings in very rough form.” He encouraged Rimland to keep going.
Over time, as their relationship developed, their correspondence took on a more relaxed tone, like that between mentor and protégé. Kanner must have known that Rimland’s investigations were moving the younger man in a direction that would correct the sullied record on mothers and autism—much of which had been Kanner’s doing in the first place. Kanner had not yet found the opportunity to recant. But he was making amends another way: by taking Rimland seriously, nudging him along in his efforts, encouraging him to continue developing the theory that autism was organic in nature. It was an extraordinary act of mentorship toward a man he had never met and whose work risked discrediting his own to some extent.
Rimland hit a wall, however, when he approached Bruno Bettelheim. Rimland’s first letter to Bettelheim was a request for names of families he could contact in the Chicago area, where Rimland had found a lab that could run blood tests for some chromosome studies he was trying to organize. By this time, 1965 to 1966, Bettelheim had read some of Rimland’s writing and knew he was being directly challenged on his own psychogenic theory of autism.
“I…shall give you no help,” Bettelheim wrote in response to Rimland’s request. He told Rimland he could never cooperate with someone capable of such “ill-conceived…erroneous and biased judgments.”
Rimland wrote a second time, asking Bettelheim for copies of “any reprints, reports or references” related to his cases—a routine professional courtesy. This time, Rimland hit a much deeper nerve, possibly on purpose. Rimland knew that while Bettelheim wrote often for the popular press about autism, he never exposed his work at the Orthogenic School to peer review. Even the progress reports Bettelheim was supposed to provide annually to his main funder, the Ford Foundation, had shrunk in size over the years to just two or three pages.
Bettelheim’s response was scathing. He informed Rimland that the progress he was making with the children in his care required no written proof: what he saw with his own eyes was evidence enough. Then he threw in a dash of analysis of Rimland himself: “You see, feelings are unimportant to you, and to me they are the most important thing in dealing with human beings.”
BETTELHEIM WAS LIKELY rattled because, in 1964, Rimland had pulled all of his research together and turned it into the book that would become the definitive takedown of the mother-blaming theory of autism.
Putting his findings between hard covers had been Gloria’s idea. She had watched Bernie’s “paper” grow, over four years, into a treatise hundreds of pages long. Sometime during 1962, she mentioned that he should start thinking of it as a book. Rimland took her point and began pulling it all into shape, with chapters and a title—Kanner’s Syndrome of Apparent Autism. Only one copy existed at that point, and it was all in Rimland’s own handwriting—he didn’t even know how to type.
He approached his secretary at the navy lab, asking if she would be willing to take on the job for some extra cash. She agreed, and over the course of several nights and some weekends, she typed her boss’s words onto a “ditto master,” which Rimland then ran through a ditto machine—cranking out duplicates one page at a time. Once the “books” had been stapled and the envelopes stuffed and stamped, Rimland headed to the post office with dozens of thick envelopes addressed to researchers and psychiatrists around the country, specifically ones he hoped would take the time to read his work, including Bettelheim and Kanner.
He also sent a copy to a small scientific publishing house, Appleton-Century-Crofts. The timing was a fluke; the firm’s publishers had recently come up with the idea of giving out an award that year, honoring the best new “distinguished manuscript in psychology” that it could find. They wanted to make the award an annual prize, no doubt to bring some honor and prestige to the firm itself, so they hoped to find a truly dazzling and deserving manuscript to start with.
Rimland’s manuscript must have struck whoever read it as just the thing they were looking for, because soon enough, Rimland received a letter informing him that he had won the Century Psychology Series Award of 1962. There was no check in the envelope—it wasn’t that kind of prize—but the letter promised something of far greater value to Rimland than any amount of cash: publication.
Two years later, in 1964, after a good deal more editing, revising, and narrowing down, Rimland’s book finally made its public appearance with a new title. It was called Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior. Kanner’s name wasn’t in the title any longer, but he gave Rimland an immeasurable boost by agreeing to write a foreword to the book. There could be no better endorsement than one from the man already known as the “father of autism.”
In his foreword, Kanner shared that he and Rimland had been in touch for four years already, and that Kanner himself believed the book’s contents deserved a fair hearing. His tone made it obvious to readers that, on top of professional respect, Kanner also liked Rimland. The “father of autism” was anointing Rimland a member of the family.
WHEN AN OBSCURE specialist house prints a small run of a technical book with a subtitle offering a “Neural Theory of Behavior,” it can’t be considered a publishing event. At the time Rimland’s work appeared, in 1964, there was no splash made—no talk-show bookings, no newspaper reviews. There were some brief notices in an academic journal or two, which came across as cordial and mildly interested, but those took months to reach print.
Despite the lack of fanfare, it was clear that there was an audience out there who knew about Rimland’s book. It was parents who were snapping it up—mothers like Audrey Flack who saw, in Rimland’s book, the possibility of deliverance from the story of the ice-cold mother, which had caused them so much guilt and invited so much disapproval from outsiders. Flack and others read Rimland and could see at least the beginning of the end of that damaging stereotype.
Rimland later heard that parents were actually stealing his book off the shelves of libraries, and not just to read it. They were ripping out the final pages and mailing them to Rimland. Years before the concept became popular, he had accidentally made his book interactive.
He had included a seventeen-page questionnaire, bound between his last full chapter and the start of the bibliography. It comprised seventy-six questions, a “diagnostic checklist”: “Is the child destructive?” “Will the child readily accept new sweaters, pajamas, etc.?” “Does he consistently use the word ‘you’ when he should say ‘I’?”
He called it Form E-1—the “E” standing for “experimental.” This was, of course, his area of true expertise—test design and experimental psychology. It was intended as a draft, to show his fellow psychologists a prototype version of the kind of survey he believed could pinpoint autism in children and distinguish it from, say, schizophrenia. Naturally, he wrote, such investigators would recognize that “the form is designed for completion by the children’s parents.” Parents read that as an instruction that they were to fill out the form, and they took Rimland’s closing line—“correspondence with the author is invited”—to mean he personally wanted to see the results.
It was only a week after the book was published that the first letters started arriving. Not everybody out there was pulling the library trick. Those who happened to learn of the book’s existence early had ordered it outright from Appleton-Century-Crofts, but they too were scissoring out the questionnaire and sending it, completed, to San Diego. Some chose to type out the whole questionnaire instead; others sent carbon copies around to other families they happened to know with a child like theirs. Sometimes Rimland opened an envelope to find a single sheet, with a name, an address, and the answers to his seventy-six questions.
Autism had no central gathering place, and the book had only word of mouth to drive its marketing, so it was hit or miss as to whom Rimland heard from. In upstate New York, for example, Ruth Sullivan, as active as she was, would hear nothing of the book for quite some time.
Along with each letter Rimland received came a story. Mothers and fathers unburdened themselves to him, the only person they’d ever known carrying the title “Dr.” who also knew which questions really applied to their kids’ unusual natures. Not all of them realized they were writing to a fellow parent, because Rimland never mentioned the autism in his own family in his book. He’d done that so as not to undermine his credibility among scientific and professional readers.
The parents only knew that they’d found a sympathetic expert, who then turned out to be one of them. Rimland, for his part, treated each one of these letters as the beginning of a relationship; there was not a single family who did not receive a long letter in Rimland’s handwriting in response, and most ended up getting a phone call as well, long distance from San Diego. Some would come to know Rimland as a dear friend.
Right from the start, Rimland recognized what these parents represented—the beginning of a movement. In the same way that Ruth Sullivan, in the smaller orbit of Albany, New York, began emerging as a force by organizing mothers, Rimland now had a connection to all these families, whose numbers climbed into the several hundreds as the months passed and their letters continued to arrive in his mailbox. Soon Rimland began organizing his navy travel schedule, which took him to bases all around the United States, to squeeze in visits to the homes of these parents. Sometimes he would pull together several families at once, giving them the comfort of knowing they were far less alone with autism than they had thought.
These families were giving Rimland something else vital as well: data. As their answers to his Form E-1 continued piling up on his desk at home, Rimland found himself, unexpectedly, the holder of more raw information on more cases of autism in children than anyone anywhere—far more even than Kanner, who was in the habit of calling his Baltimore clinic autism’s “clearinghouse.”
This allowed Rimland to start working on studies of his own, particularly in the area of possible treatments. In 1965, he completed a special one-year program at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Behavioral Research. Largely on the strength of his book and the publisher’s prize, he’d been awarded a one-year fellowship there, which came with no obligations other than to think and write on whatever interested him—with free secretarial support as part of the package. Naturally, he upped his reading and writing on autism.
His stature in the field of autism was growing exponentially, to the point where, in a few years, the Salt Lake City Tribune would refer to him as “one of the nation’s leading authorities on autism,” and the Oxnard Press Courier would call him “a recognized authority on communication and behavioral disorders.”
More important, his argument about the nature of autism as the result of something organic was making headway. When Washington Post writer Ellen Hoffman put together a short piece about autism in July 1969, she wrote about the conflict of views between the “two major schools of thought on the causes and treatment of autism”—essentially Rimland versus Bettelheim. Hoffman didn’t take sides. For the first time, the two men—one a parent, the other a blamer of parents—were being presented as public equals.
BERNARD RIMLAND HAD the standing and credibility, and Ruth Sullivan had the drive and skills to organize. But in 1964, he was in San Diego, she was in Albany, and neither knew the other existed. It took a TV show, and an autism dad neither of them knew personally, to help them find each other.
Robert Crean was a playwright and a television scriptwriter during the last years of TV’s first Golden Age, when networks staged live, intelligent, challenging dramas that tended to set the bar high for everything else—for science-fiction shows like The Twilight Zone and courtroom dramas like The Defenders, each of which Crean wrote several scripts for.
Shortly after one p.m. on Sunday, February 7, 1965, a show called Directions 65 aired on ABC. The episode was called “Conall,” and it was about an eight-year-old boy of that name who, according to the television listing, was “severely retarded.” Actually, Conall had autism, and he was not an actor. Robert Crean, who had written the script, was his father.
The program aired, telling the story, through still photographs and tape-recorded interviews with Conall’s many brothers and sisters, of how the entire family was affected by their younger sibling’s autism. Little noticed at the time was how truly groundbreaking the program was: this was the first instance of network television broadcasting an extended profile of a person with autism. Once again, it was a parent who was behind the precedent-setting effort, motivated, one of his sons would say later, by the passion to have his family’s situation understood, both the good and the bad of it.
There was no television in the Sullivan house. Ruth had banned it, having decided TV was bad for the kids. But that afternoon, an excited relative called to let her know that she had just seen a show about autism, and that the boy in it had reminded her a great deal of Ruth’s son Joe. Disappointed that she had missed something so monumental, Ruth decided to track down Crean himself. When she finally got him on the phone, it was a long, spirited conversation—the kind autism parents had on those rare instances when they first found one another. Crean kept referring to the “Rimland book,” which he had just finished reading. When Sullivan confessed to having never heard of it, Crean explained to her that this book was very important, that it was the first thing he’d ever read on autism that wasn’t the same old nonsense about mothers being to blame.
Ruth wrote down the name. Bernard Rimland. San Diego. A long-distance call would cost too much. But when she and Crean hung up, she sat down and wrote Rimland a long letter.
Ruth and Rimland would click instantly. Right away, the two saw each other as natural allies. Sullivan knew how to work legislators and the media; Rimland was masterful at digesting research and could talk to doctors and scientists in their own language. Both wanted to force major change in how their children were perceived, treated, and educated. And both had been piecing together a network of parents as best they could.
In late summer of 1965, after much correspondence back and forth between them, it occurred to Sullivan, the natural organizer, that it was past time to rally these many isolated families into a single nationwide society of some sort. She pushed these ideas around on paper for a while, and then shaped them into another letter for Rimland. But it crossed in the mail with a letter from him to her, in which he informed her that he had decided, on his own, to launch a national organization, and that he would like her help.
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY for Autistic Children was born on the evening of November 14, 1965, in a private home in Teaneck, New Jersey, just over the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan. Over the previous weeks, calls had been made and letters sent to parents in several states, giving the time and date, and the address of a couple named Herbert and Rosalyn Kahn. The Kahns’ five-year-old son, Jerry, had been diagnosed with autism by Leo Kanner himself. Ever since, the couple, who had two daughters as well, had not done much entertaining, so they were a little out of practice at hosting more than a few visitors at a time. On the other hand, given that this evening event fell on a Tuesday, not during school vacation, it was probably optimistic to expect many parents to turn up in Teaneck at all.
But a little after seven p.m., the first cars—some bearing license plates from as far away as Maryland and Massachusetts—began turning onto Essex Road, heading for the white-brick house standing next to where the woods stopped, across from the church, and down the street from the public school. Coincidentally, that school signified something important the Kahns had in common with all the parents arriving that night from all over. Even in Teaneck, which that year became the first school system in the United States to desegregate its all-white schools voluntarily, children with autism had no legal right to go to public school.
As eight o’clock approached, somewhere between thirty and sixty people—accounts vary—had already assembled in the Kahns’ living room. If standing up all night was going to be an inconvenience, nobody cared. Instead, in the moment when the guests finally laid eyes on one another and grasped that they had actually filled an entire house with people who knew what autism was, and what it was like to be raising a child who had the condition, the feeling in the room changed to something electric. After all those years of loneliness and blame, the parents leaned on one another, letting go in a way they never could, or ever had, even among their extended families or closest friends.
It would be this way ever after whenever and wherever autism parents got together: insiders sharing stories, swapping advice, and taking pleasure in actually getting to laugh, for a change, about autism—about those few but real moments when they find the stuff their kids do more uproariously funny than sad. On that Tuesday night in 1965, that’s what they were, for the first time—a whole house full of insiders.
At the center of the energy was the pair who had pulled the group together: Bernie Rimland, who had flown in from California, and Ruth Sullivan, who had driven down from Albany. The agenda for the evening included a talk by Mary Goodwin, a pediatrician who had been experimenting with a communication device called the “talking typewriter,” and a presentation by Rimland on new advances in behavioral work being done with kids with autism. But the main event was the decision, by acclamation, to create the nationwide organization Rimland and Sullivan had in mind: the National Society for Autistic Children—or NSAC—which was almost immediately referred to as “n-sack” for colloquial purposes. Their logo would be a puzzle piece, as from a jigsaw puzzle.
A few initial bylaws were discussed and officers were appointed. A mother of autistic twin girls from the Washington, DC, area, Mooza Grant, was named NSAC’s first president. Everyone there resolved to establish local chapters back home, looping in local parents and reaching out to already established groups, such as Ruth’s in Albany, encouraging them to join.
Finally, there was a discussion of launching an NSAC newsletter. Other than paying dues of two dollars a year and carrying an official NSAC membership card, that mailer would be the parents’ principal means of keeping in touch on a nationwide scale. That was key to the whole enterprise—to create a sense that, from now on, they had one another, and that they were all part of something bigger.
It was after midnight when the women finally turned to emptying the ashtrays and busing drinking glasses back into the kitchen while their husbands hunted down hats and overcoats. Then they dispersed, stepping outside the Kahn home, and crossing the darkness to their cars.
Looking back at that night, Ruth Sullivan would always say the parents felt that something had changed as they drove away from Essex Road. Now they had one another, and now their kids’ future suddenly looked different.
“For the first time,” she would say later, “we had hope.”