Autistic savant amazes students
By Darren Ivy
Staff Reporter
It takes most people several min
utes to read a page in a book.
Kim Peek can do it in 12 seconds.
In fact, he can read two pages simulta
neously in 12 seconds.
Peek, an autistic savant who was
one of three people studied for the
movie “Rain Man,” paid a visit to
Coach Tom Osborne and student ath
letes at Memorial Stadium on
Wednesday afternoon.
Peek, 45, came to UNL because he
likes interacting with children, his
father, Fran Peek, said. Since “Rain
Man” won four Oscars in 1989, Kim
and Fran Peek have interacted with
more than 670,000 people, including
490,000 students.
The student athletes who listened
to Kim Peek at the west stadium train
ing table were amazed by his ability to
recall game scores, ZIP codes and
other interesting facts.
“He is an unbelievable man,” said
Mike Brown, sophomore NU football
player.
Freshman football player Joe
Walker gave Kim Peek the five num
bers in his ZIP code. It took Peek less
than five seconds to tell Walker he was
from Arlington, Texas, and that a cer
tain highway ran through the middle of
the town.
“How does he do that?” asked a
stunned Walker.
Kim Peek knows the location by
intersecting highways, area Codes, ZIP
codes, the counties, historical events
that have taken place in that area and
television stations by channel that can
be seen in the town or city discussed,
his father said.
Peek was born with brain damage
and a neuromotor dysfunction. A com
prehensive brain scan in 1988 con
firmed he had a single brain, or a fused
hemisphere, and a severely damaged
right side cerebellum, which affects
signals that govern motor skills.
He is also missing a corpus callo
sum, the part of the brain that filters
out materials, his father said. He
retains nearly everything he reads
including information from more than
7,600 books.
“He is always reading,” Fran Peek
said.
In addition, he has a rare optical*
system that enables him to read right
and left side pages at the same time
with total recall.
Most autistic savants can recite
information from two or three sub
jects, but Peek is able to recite infor
mation from some 15 categories, Fran
Peek said.
Kim Peek met Barry Morrow,
author of the original script and
screenplay for the movie “Rain Man,”
in 1984.
Before meeting Morrow, Kim
Peek was timid and nonsocial. He was
diagnosed as autistic and severely
mentally retarded. It was also deter
mined that he would never be able to
walk.
After meeting and studying Kim
Peek before the production of “Rain
Man,” Dustin Hoffman and Morrow
told Fran Peek that he needed to take
him out into the real world.
“Kim will grow,” they said. “So
will everyone who meets him.” ~
Hoffman and Morrow were right
because his autistic characteristics
have mostly disappeared since he left
the isolation and the protection of his
home and ventured into the real world,
Fran Peek said.
“He walks right up to everyone,
takes their hand or places his hand on
their shoulders and asks them their
name, where they are from, and if he
can find out their birthday he will tell
them what day of the week they were
bom,” Fran Peek said.
Kim Peek will speak at the
Mahoney State Park Kiewit Lodge
4onight at 7 and at Bryan Memorial
Hospital Professional Building and
Education Center on Saturday at 10
a.m.
Onlay ■■ibu QXa i < Jr
i I ° * 1 ""I H M m D lJ
Democratic fund-raisers:
Wrongdoings began earlier
WASHINGTON (AP) — Two
Democratic fund-raisers are pre
pared to testify that irregularities
involving foreign money and straw
donors began during the 1992 elec
tion that brought President Clinton
to power, a House investigator said
Wednesday as he began a new round
of public hearings.
Opening the House’s version of
Congress’ hearings on fund-raising
abuses, Rep. Dan Burton, R.-Ind.,
announced the cooperation offer
from fund-raisers Gene and £k>ra
Lum, who themselves pleaded
guilty to fund-raising wrongdoing
earlier this year.
it appears... the seeds ot today s
scandals may have been planted as
early as 1991,” Burton said.
Democratic Rep. Paul Kanjorski
of Pennsylvania retorted that the
Republicans were reaching conclu
sions “before the evidence is in.”
Burton said the Lums were pre
pared to testify — in exchange for
immunity from prosecution — that
the Clinton campaign wrote a letter
endorsing the candidacy of the
leader of an Asian country in 1992 in
exchange for a $50,000 contribution
— possibly foreign money — to a
Democrat-affiliated group the Lums
had formed. The country was not
named.
The Lums will also disclose
financial help offered by the Riady
family of Indonesia and fund-raising
irregularities committed with the
knowledge of the Democratic
National Committee, Burton said.
The announcement capped a
whirlwind day in the investigations
during which a White House lawyer
was questioned before a federal
grand jury and Senate hearings
turned even more rancorous than
they had been.
Across the Capitol, former
White House deputy chief of staff
Harold Ickes gave a feisty defense of
the Democratic fund raising he
orchestrated from the White House.
And Democrats turned the tables
on Senate committee chairman Fred
i nompson, k.- ienn., prompting mm
to apologize for a line of questions
that suggested Ickes and President
Clinton may have know about an
illegal fund-raising scheme involv
ing the Teamsters union.
Thompson introduced reco
showing that a union consultant emu
two Clinton-Gore campaign fund
raisers implicated in the scheme had
been to the White House for a meet
ing with Clinton in June 1996 — the
month prosecutors allege the
scheme was hatched.
But Democrats quickly dis
closed it wasn’t a private meeting
but rather a luncheon for donors.
Ickes said he couldn’t recall the
event, but emphatically denied that
either he or Clinton knew of the ille
gal scheme.
“I left the wrong impression,”
Thompson said.
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