By LAURA NOVAK

Haywood, Calif.#

WILSON TALLEY spent a lifetime meticulously constructing his résumé as

a world-renowned nuclear physicist. He taught for 35 years at the University

of California, Davis, and worked as a teaching assistant to Edward Teller, the

father of the hydrogen bomb, with whom he wrote two books. Dr. Talley also

served as a consultant to corporations and foundations, and was an adviser to

Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan.

Then, five years ago, Dr. Talley added another pearl to his strand of

academic accomplishments. While recovering from a stroke that devastated

his life and career, he became the first person in his speech therapy program

to attend preschool.

Dr. Talley, who lost many communication skills including speech, acted

the dual roles of language student and physics professor.

“Wilson came to me one day and said: ‘More. Has to be more,’.” said Dr.

Jan R. Avent, a professor of communicative sciences and disorders at

California State University, East Bay (formerly Hayward). She is also the

director of the university’s Aphasia Treatment Program, where Dr. Talley is a

patient.

“So my proposal was: ‘You know science. We have children on this campus

who need to learn science. How do you feel about going in to be a science

teacher?’.” Dr. Avent said. “And he took a step back, thought for maybe five

seconds and said, ‘Yes, do it.’.”

Aphasia is a language impairment brought on by brain injury. It affects

reading, writing, speaking and listening. Of the 500,000 Americans who

survive strokes each year, 25 to 40 percent become aphasic. And while the

National Center for Health Statistics cites a marginal increase of white men

over women who have strokes, aphasia ultimately affects the sexes equally.

“Suddenly, when you’re without the ability to communicate the way you

always have, it’s like death,” said Dr. Avent, who for 25 years has worked with

aphasia patients, ranging in age from 20 to over 70. Nearly 75 percent of her

patients do not return to work, she said.

Dr. Talley was 63 years old in 1998, when his life changed irrevocably. As

the director (now president emeritus) of the Fannie and John Hertz

Foundation in Livermore, Calif., he was visiting New York City to interview

fellowship candidates in physics. In a Midtown hotel room he woke up at 2

a.m. partly paralyzed, able to crawl to the bathroom. By breakfast time, in a

disheveled state — he could not shower or shave because he was unable to

operate the faucets — Dr. Talley could say only yes and no. He managed to

elude worried graduate students and hotel staff who wanted to get him

medical help, but he could not respond appropriately. Having regained

mobility when the blood flow returned to part of his brain, Dr. Talley then

waved an airline ticket, caught a cab to the airport (which one is still in

dispute, said his wife, Helen) and miraculously changed his return flight home

to San Francisco, arriving a day early. He wandered the airport for three hours

and tried to board another plane, until airline officials became concerned and

went through his luggage to find his identification. They then called his wife at

home.

Weeks later, doctors in a Berkeley hospital told Mrs. Talley to put her

husband, who could not even remember his wife’s name, in a nursing home.

“They felt he was not going to progress,” she said.

Instead, she enrolled him in Dr. Avent’s Aphasia Treatment Program,

which she learned of through an employee at the Hertz Foundation. The goal

was to have him relearn multiple communication skills besides handling

money and crossing a street. “He felt so overwhelmed at first,” Mrs. Talley

said. “So he’d just close his eyes and go to sleep.”

“Yes, this is it,” Dr. Talley said about those first months in the program.

Two years later, after trying traditional forms of speech therapy and more

controversial treatments like Edward Teller’s personal hyperbaric oxygen

chamber, Dr. Talley grew impatient with his progress.

At the same time, Dr. Avent was searching educational literature for ways

to help some of her highly accomplished patients adapt more successfully to

what she calls their “uninvited retirement.”

She drew on the educational concept of “apprenticeship learning,” in

which children guide adults in a classroom. She named her method

“reciprocal scaffolding” and chose Dr. Talley to test it in a six-week trial at the

university’s Early Childhood Education Center. But Mrs. Talley had

reservations about the plan, knowing her husband to be a “brilliant man too

involved in his professional career” to engage with youngsters.

“He didn’t have the time or interest for people, let alone children,” Mrs.

Talley said.

Dr. Avent saw it differently. She thought Dr. Talley was a natural choice

not only because of his background but also because the hands-on nature of

science instruction could help his recovery. Dr. Avent’s aim was to see if Dr.

Talley could draw on his pre-stroke knowledge and improve his language

skills by acting as a teacher to 4-year-olds. The idea was for them to teach one

another, with simple language as their platform.

“I wanted to see if he would have better access to the vocabulary of his

life’s career,” Dr. Avent said. “And that’s exactly what happened.”

During the spring of 2000, Dr. Talley’s lesson plans evolved from the

grammatically incorrect phrase “Monday with the children’s” to lists of

ingredients he would need for the experiments and elaborate cause-and-effect

diagrams to prove each thesis.

When the six-week trial ended, Dr. Avent published a paper about Dr.

Talley in the journal Aphasiology. She also presented her findings at

conferences while grappling with the problem of what to do next for Dr.

Talley’s development.

But the preschoolers and their teachers had grown used to their

“professor” and the bag of tricks he brought to the classroom twice a week. As

for Dr. Talley, he had successfully adapted to the commotion of preschool and

warmed to the children. The world at large was no longer so overwhelming for

him and his social life began to expand. The school’s teachers asked their

professor to stay on, and he accepted.

“This is right here,” Dr. Talley said, pointing to the latest entry on his

résumé, which lists his recent years of teaching at the preschool.

A pen and small pads of paper are still essential conversational props for

Dr. Talley. Diagrams provide clarification. Numbers, which he writes often,

sometimes confuse rather than confirm a point. But writing things on a pad

doesn’t work with a class of 4-year-olds. They are quick to remind him that

they can’t read it. So Dr. Talley has learned to rely on his speech when

conducting the experiments.

On a recent Wednesday morning, Dr. Talley tried to show the children how

a common food could be used to conduct electricity. He rolled a large orange

across a round table to the nine squirming children and their teacher, Debbie

Vigil. They discussed shapes and smells. Managing to block out the

cacophony, Dr. Talley meticulously inserted two metal probes into the orange.

At the same time, he held a black box with a small digital clock in it. Wires

connected the probes to the box. With enough manipulation, Dr. Talley got the

acidic juice from the orange to illuminate the clock. As the numbers on the

clock flashed, the children and their professor counted together.

The next experiment was about air flow and movement. “Now you; now

you,” Dr. Talley said to the preschoolers, helping each child pump air into a

balloon. Wincing for fear of a loud pop, Dr. Talley took the inflated balloon

and attached it to the nozzle of a bottle glued to a paper plate. The downward

motion of the air sent the plate across the table like a Hovercraft. The

delighted children shrieked as Ms. Vigil, their teacher, elaborated in ways that

Dr. Talley could not on the laws of motion.

Dr. Talley completed one more assignment with the children before

grabbing his own school bag and heading off to a long afternoon of classes in

the aphasia program.

He devised new experiments with the children twice a week until this

month. Then he heads to the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of

California, Berkeley, where he will spend the summer working with 6- to 12-

year-olds under the guidance of a mentor.

Asked if he enjoys teaching Newtonian physics to such young children, Dr.

Talley replied: “Yes, yes, this is very good. I love it.”