By the time the girls' father sued successfully to reunite the family, well into World War II, he was driving a Cadillac. The family shared in some of the riches as well. It was estimated that the public exhibition of the girls, known as Quintland, increased revenues for Ontario by $110 million over those nine years. So did Amelia Earhart, six weeks before her final flight, not to mention thousands of ordinary families on vacation.Īll were transfixed, but never, apparently, troubled by the bizarreness, even cruelty, of the arrangement - the girls' separation from their parents and from other children, their confinement in a setting they were allowed to leave only three times over the course of nine years, their government's exploitation of a random biological novelty to bring tourist dollars into a depressed province. Mae West, Clark Gable, and Bette Davis all made the trip north. The future queen of England would visit them. They were a matched set, yet unmatched in the example they set of human resilience, and the most famous children on earth. Invariably, the moment they came into view, a warm sigh would float aloft, followed by coos, squeals, and scattered applause at the sight of history's first surviving identical quintuplets, who had been given only hours to live the night they were born, in May of the previous year.Įxotic by virtue of their genetic rarity, the Dionne quintuplets imprinted themselves indelibly on their generation. The audience was packed into a specially designed viewing arcade, tented and fitted with one-way screens so that the girls could never see who was making all the noise. Three times a day, on cue, the girls were carried out to a grass-covered "play area" just a few yards from where a crowd waited for them. There they would have indoor plumbing, electricity, and a "scientific" upbringing overseen by a full-time doctor and two full-time nurses.
By order of the provincial government, they had recently been removed from the care of their farmer parents, to be raised instead in a hurriedly built "hospital" situated not far from the family farmhouse.
That year, up to six thousand visitors each day took Route 11 into far northern Ontario for the sole purpose of gawking at the babies. In 1935, five Canadian baby girls, all sisters, edged out Niagara Falls on the list of Canada's most popular tourist draws. Read on for an excerpt from "In a Different Key: The Story of Autism."
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