The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

 

- Winston Churchill

 

 

Chapter 11

GENETIC TRANSMISSION

                           

ADD is inherited in more than 80% of the cases diag­nosed.  A 40% probability exists that people with ADD in­herited it directly from a parent (25% linked to fathers). Where did mine come from?  My father's bloodline transmitted it. Symptoms can be traced through my father, to my paternal grandfather and his father.  Each of us repre­sents a different con­stellation of traits:  I was a “lazy”, underachieving kid; my father was a disruptive, op­positional child; my grandfa­ther, Edwin, was an im­patient and fear­less adult; and my great-grandfather, Charles, was an adventurer and creative dreamer—a "driven per­son.”[1] All three of my forebears were "busy," physi­cally active men well into their 70s. (Be­cause of my ADD/-H, I am lethargic—just the oppo­site).

 

My Father

 

My father's stories about his childhood hold many clues about his ADD/+H.  I grew up hearing his reoccurring accounts of the physical abuse inflicted on him by his father, Edwin, and stepmother, Nora.  Edwin hired Nora as a nanny to care for his four young sons after my grandmother, Ruby, died of a stroke two months be­fore her 26th birthday.  (My fa­ther, the third son, born in 1915, was 31 months old when his mother died.)  Edwin married Nora shortly after he em­ployed her in the house­hold.

Nora fit the fairy tale stereotype of the mean step­mother in the Cinderella and Hanzel and Gretal chil­dren's stories.  My father believed that she disliked him because of his close relationship with his mater­nal grandmother.  He imagined that Nora's "insane jealousy" of her deceased ri­val, Ruby, was displaced onto him be­cause of the bond with his grandmother, and that was the reason his stepmother beat him severely.  His fantasy almost sounds like a story from a Greek Tragedy or the subplot in a Shakespearean play.

My father's vivid memories of daily beatings with a horse whip still enraged him in his 80's and brought tears to his eyes as he recalled the abuse.  His father whipped him in second grade for calling another boy a "damn fool."  When he did not recant after 30 days of whippings, my grandfather marched him to school with the threat that, if he did not apologize to the principal for his behav­ior, he would be sent to reform school.  My father was afraid and began to cry, but he refused to apologize.

The beatings endured by my father did not im­prove his behavior; they only made him bitter and wounded his self-esteem.  The backs of his legs were per­petually bruised from as many as four beatings a day until the age of 12 when he threatened to run away.  As a former child pro­tective service supervi­sor, I marvel at my father's resil­ience.[2]  Despite con­stant verbal and physical abuse as a child, he did not perpetuate the abuse on me.  He was sometimes impatient, like his father and grandfather, but he was a loving parent. 

The popular mantra, "Spare the rod and spoil the child," is a misinterpretation of the biblical admoni­tion.  The "rod" in scriptures is the crooked staff used by sheepherders to lead sheep.  Herders do not beat the animals with it.  Research has shown that physi­cal punish­ment tends to increase aggressive behavior in chil­dren to­ward their peers (Strassberg, et al., 1994).  

Why did my dad's parents single him out for abuse? In my opinion, they did not abuse him be­cause his maternal grand­mother favored him. He once reflected with great understatement, "I was probably the liveliest kid in the family" and admitted that he talked out a lot in the classroom.  In other words, he was hyperac­tive.[3]  My father earned fail­ing grades in citizenship at school and his parents cruelly told that his disruptive be­havior had caused the mental breakdown of his first grade teacher. He had difficulty in school with reading and more advanced mathematics—geometry and al­gebra.  In retire­ment, he began to read books for pleasure, but admitted that he had never liked to read much before that. 

One of my dad's favorite expressions was the punch line from an old joke about a man in an in­sane asy­lum who helps a stranded motorist fix a tire.  The passerby is as­tonished that the mentally ill man is so capable.  The asylum resi­dent responds, "I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid." He was hypersensitive about his lack of education and felt deval­ued by col­lege-educated peo­ple. Practical ex­perience, he be­lieved, should count in society as much as formal edu­ca­tion—a person's value should not be based on educa­tional attainment alone. Feeling stupid or crazy is a common fear of peo­ple with ADD.

My father held 25 short-term jobs in 17 years before starting his own cabinet shop.  He was em­ployed as a cannery packer, construction laborer, dairy milker, farm hand, furniture factory worker, lumberjack, gas station operator, aerospace worker, fisherman and woodworker.  He had a history of quitting jobs on im­pulse.  In one year, during his early-married life, he left eight jobs because of dis­satisfaction or argu­ments with supervisors.  He did not take criticism well.

The Boeing Company hired my dad in 1939 to "buck rivets" on the wings and ailerons of the B-17 “Flying Fortress.”   After a month, he progressed to riv­eter; in ten months, he became a lead man in the company's wood shop.  He later helped build a jig for the bomb bay doors of the B-17 and worked on a mockup of the plane's tricycle landing gear.  He was bored during slack periods at Boeing and complained about co-workers, he called "suck holes," who "kissed up" to their supervisors.  My dad refused to play shop politics.  He quit when he did not get an anticipated pay raise.

My father's next job was a two-month stint in the metal shop at Pan American Airlines, fol­lowed by a six-month position at the Sand Point Na­val Air Sta­tion wood shop.  (He did cabinetry at the home of Teamster labor leader, Dave Beck, while working in one several short-term woodworking jobs during this era.)  Then he tried his hand at commer­cial fishing for one season in 1945.  Finally setting up his own cabinet-making business in 1951 with an initial in­vest­ment of $1,000, my father flourished as an inde­pendent small businessperson.  Fami­lies throughout the Se­attle area, including the editor of a major Se­attle newspa­per and the president of a local insur­ance company, sought his custom-made cabi­nets.  He admitted that he never liked to take direc­tions from supervisors and counseled me about the joy and pride of run­ning one's own business.[4]

My mother was a good money manager.  She kept the books for my father's cabinet shop and was con­servative about spending money.  She held my fa­ther's financial impulses in check. (She set firm limits with me and kept my im­pulses in line too.)

“Marrying your mother was the best thing I ever did.” my father said. “I was wild. I was going no­where.” He added, “She got me to go to church.” 

When my mother became ill with cancer and tried to pre­pare my father for her physical decline and the eventuality of her death, she became frustrated when he did not seem to pay attention to her instructions about cooking, clothes washing and bill paying.  His response was, "That won't be a problem."  I ex­plained to her that his long-standing inattention to such matters was sympto­matic of ADD.  My father gradu­ally started to master household tasks, but ex­pressed difficulty in remembering and following my mother's instructions, espe­cially when she enumer­ated too many steps at one time. His apparent out­ward lack of concern about my mother's health is ironic:  as a chronic worrier since childhood, he of­ten had diffi­culty falling asleep because of ru­mination over daily prob­lems. 

 

My Grandfather

 

My grandfather, Edwin Charles (E. C.) Miller, was born in Moo­sic, Pennsylvania in 1879. As the oldest of seven children (only three survived childhood), Edwin dropped out of school in the third grade to help sup­port his family.  At the age of 19, he came west with his family, and for a time was employed as a river­boat captain on the Yukon River during the gold rush.  He owned a half-interest in the 284-ton Yukon stern-wheeler, Clara Monarch.[5]   

Edwin settled on a logged-over five-acre "stump ranch" in Woodinville, Wash­ington, and became a self-employed building contractor.  He built homes and classic round-roof barns, laying out the roof-trusses with only a building square.  He designed and built the spiral wooden staircase in the Tatoosh Lighthouse, near Neah Bay, at the northwest tip of Washington State, without a sophisticated under­standing of mathematical concepts.

Edwin was a creative man, who patented a "trap nest" for chicken coops.[6]   The invention was "sto­len" from him for a few dollars by the owner of a local chicken farm who sold the invention to a manufac­turing company that commer­cially produced it.

My dad characterized his father as a "hard-boiled mean bastard," whom he feared because of his physi­cal abuse and tough talk.  Standing only 5’ 4” tall, my grandfather seemed to com­pensate for his short stat­ure with feistiness and fear­less­ness.  Several ex­am­ples come to mind:

 

·        Edwin threatened a drunken seaman on a Yukon stern-wheeler with the boat's fire ax. 

 

·        He told of the time he spied a bear swimming in the Yukon River.  Rowing over to it in a small boat, he thought it would be sport to drown the bear with his oar.  Instead, it al­most swamped the boat and nearly drown my grandfa­ther. 

 

·        An elderly crony reported to my father that Edwin once knocked down an Alaska middleweight boxing champion in a street brawl when the man made insulting re­marks in front of my grandmother.  

 

·        Edwin threatened a neighbor, saying, "I'll give you a load of lead you won't carry home with you," when the man took water from his well with­out permis­sion. 

 

·        He intimidated a union representative with the words, "I'll shoot you as sure as you're stand­ing here," after he ordered the organizer to leave a building site.  

 

·        When another union organizer insinuated that the barn my grandfather was roofing might burn down if he did not hire union labor, he re­sponded:  "If it burns down, I won't know who set it, but I'll know who sent him, and I know where to find you!"  He started down the ladder with an upraised hatchet in his left hand.[7]   The union man never returned.

 

Edwin served for a while as the constable of Woodin­ville.  Despite his short stature, it is doubtful that anyone fright­ened him.

My grandfather had a sarcastic, satirical sense of humor—what his niece, Mary Jane Miller, called "dry wit."  A Look magazine clipping (circa 1940) features a photograph of a series of six handmade Burma Shave-type signs attributed to an anonymous poet posted on a Woodinville road.  Critical of the safety of an old unpaved brick road, they proclaimed:

 

             

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edwin penned another set of signs, positioned at both ends of a local bridge.  On one side a sign read:

             

        

 

On the opposite end, a second sign stated:

 

          

 

       

My grandfather, whose identity as the waggish sign painter remained a secret, became known as the "Woodin­ville Poet."

 

My Great-Grandfather

 

My great-grandfather, Charles Edwin Miller, better known as  “Capt. C. E. Miller,” was born in 1856 in Carbon County, Pennsylvania, to John and Eliza Andreas Miller. (Eliza was a direct de­scendant of May­flower passengers Francis Cooke and Thomas Rogers.)  John's father, Peter Miller, is thought to be descended from Christian Miller, Sr., who emigrated from Switzerland to Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, in 1749. Charles' ances­tors were Ger­man-speaking members of Pennsylvania Dutch cul­ture.

In the 1870s, Charles worked as an anthracite coal miner at Mauch Chunk (pronounced “Mock-Chunk,” now called “Jim Thorpe”), during a turbulent period in the history of the Penn­sylvania coalfields.[8]  From there, he moved to Moosic in about 1876.  Charles married Emma Jane Richmann at Pleas­ant Valley, Pennsylvania, in 1878.  In 1882, he operated a general store in Moosic that sold “no liquors.”  (On a life insurance application, he wrote that he used alcohol “not at all” nor, he declared, had he ever used opium.)  Sometime later he became a building contractor, but went bankrupt when he underbid the cost of a church construction pro­ject.

After financial setbacks, Charles retired to his bed­room for hours or days at a time.  There he rocked in his chair until he thought of a new scheme for mak­ing money.  Hartmann describes this be­havior in adults with ADD as the ability to "think visually"—to create pictures or "out­lines . . . of where they've been and where they're going [1993, p. 15]."

Charles also had the habit of secluding himself for days in a shed behind his house where he worked on his inven­tions.  His Edison-like behavior (the fa­mous inventor is believed to have had ADD)—that is, hy­perfocusing on pro­jects, is also characteristic of some adults with ADD.  Wil­liam James describes this phe­nome­non, which he called "passive intellectual at­tention," in The Principles of Psy­chology, published in 1890.  He cites examples of famous people through­out history who exhibited the ability to be­come so absorbed in the creative, intellec­tual process that they shut out other stimuli.[9]

In the first of two family migrations, Charles moved his family to Nemo, Ten­nessee, in the early 1890s.[10]  (Nemo no longer exists; the Tennessee Valley Au­thority perma­nently flooded the land years later.)  There he operated a sawmill on the bank of the Emory River.  One night Charles claimed he had a clairvoyant dream that foretold the de­struction of the mill by fire the next day.  He warned workers to leave the mill and it did burn down.  The circumstances surrounding the fire seem suspicious.  Why did Charles not prevent the fire, having antici­pated it?  Did he intentionally set it?  He was a sen­sation seeker, as his later move to the Yukon would prove, with symp­toms of "high-stimu­lation" ADD.  Per­sons with this type of ADD can have impulse control problems like pyro­mania (Hal­lowell & Ratey, 1994a).

In 1897, Charles moved his wife Emma and their three surviving children, in­cluding my 19 year-old grandfather, Edwin, to the Yukon Territory in Can­ada.  This second family migration began at the on­set of the gold rush. What type of man did the Yukon attract?  Robert Service, re­portedly an acquaint­ance of Charles, described would-be Yukon gold seekers in his poems, The Rhyme of the Rest­less Ones and The Men That Don't Fit In (Service, 1907).  He portrays pros­pectors as fearless, impulsive and rest­less—men unsuited to conventional jobs or life­styles.  These po­ems are metaphoric representations of adults with ADD (R. S. Miller, 1998).

Charles fit the Klondike stereotypes of Service.  He was restless, impatient and impulsive. He was also a versatile entrepreneur.  For 33 years Charles earned a living in the Yukon as a steamboat captain, saw­mill operator, coal miner, gold prospector, res­taurateur and hotelier.  The naming of Mount Miller in 1911 me­morialized his ac­complishments there (Coutts, 1980).

Charles owned three Yukon coal mines:  Five Fin­gers, Tan­talus and Tantalus Butte.  George Carmack, the man who laid claim to the Bonanza Creek strike that pre­cipitated the gold rush, first discov­ered the latter mine in 1893.  Charles mined 40,000 tons of coal between 1903 and 1905 to supply fuel for Dawson's electric company and the Klondike's rail­roads.

Known locally as "Captain Miller," Charles piloted four stern-wheel steam­boats:  Clara,[11] Eldorado, Fly­ing, and Reindeer.  He was the first person in the Yukon to convert steamboat boilers to coal power.  Before that time, wood fueled the boats. Each con­sumed be­tween one to four cords of spruce wood per hour. Charles' experiment with coal lasted two years, and then ended because of the coal's poor quality.

"Charles was a genius," my father said of his grand­father. As was noted in the last chapter, several contemporary authors link creativity and intelligence with ADD (for ex­ample, see Hart­mann, 1993; Hallo­well & Ratey, 1994a; Cramond, 1994). A recent study (Robin et al., 1997) seems to confirm this.

My father also observed, "Charles was a poor family man."  My fa­ther's cousin echoed this senti­ment. She writes, "He [Charles] was a 'hard' man.  Daddy [John Miller] said he often came up the stairs at night cracking a bullwhip as he came.  Ap­parently he ruled by intimidation and implied vio­lence [M. J. Miller, 1993]."  Emma, Charles' wife, fi­nally sepa­rated from Charles ten months before her death at age 70, never to reconcile. She suffered through al­most 50 years of marriage to him.

The use of the whip to intimidate his children was pre­sumably a vestige of Charles' own upbringing and his educational experience.  "Pennsylvania Dutch" parents abhorred laziness.  An old remedy for the laziness of young people reads,

 

Take a stick or wand of a yard of length ore more, & lett itt bee so grate as a man's fynger; and with it annoynt ye back and shoulders well, mornings and evenings, and thys doe twenty-one days [Jordan, 1978, p. 3].

 

Early Pennsylvania Dutch schools commonly dis­ci­plined children with a cat-o'-nine tails.  Lashes might number as few as one for climbing a tree (one foot above the three-foot mark) and up to ten for "misbe­having to girls" or "playing cards at school [Risser, 1997]."

When Charles died alone at Dawson in 1930 at the age of 74, old friends came to his funeral, but none of his three children attended the service.  Edwin and his brother, John, told their children that they hated their father.  The brothers never spoke of Charles again.  He re­mains a puzzle to the grand­children who never met him.  "How could children not love their father?" they wonder.

Charles was apparently died penniless.  The public administrator in Dawson arranged for his burial.  "He was a poor money manager," my father said.  "He made and lost several small fortunes that totaled about $100,000."  (That amount would be worth $2 million in 1998 U.S. dollars.)  Charles' money management problem is another likely symptom of his ADD.

Captain Charles Miller, "the man from Nemo," was somewhat like the fictional Captain Nemo in Jules Verne's classic, Twenty Thousand Leagues Un­der the Sea.  Both were boat cap­tains, both were harsh enigmatic men, both were crea­tive and both sought gold.  Each man kept prisoners:  Captain Nemo's prisoners were captured from an Ameri­can frigate; Captain Miller's "prisoners" were his own "crew," his wife and chil­dren.  In the end, all the prisoners escaped.

This "trip" into past family history, like the time travel sequence in the movie Back to the Future, has helped me un­derstand some of my traits that  endure from the past.

 

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