Roger & Out

A car crushed his right leg last spring, and freckle-faced Leadom Beatty, 14, has been laid up in bed ever since. But last week he was "back" at school, hooked up from his bed to the sixth-grade classroom at Houston's Fannin Elementary School.

To bring Leadom to school, engineers of the Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. had rigged up an experimental machine called the "Teletalk." A special telephone circuit connects two sets of microphones and loudspeakers--one set in Teacher Fleda Cox's classroom, the other in Pupil Beatty's bedroom. Says Principal Dorothy Swope, who sold Southwestern Bell the idea: "It's surprising. When Leadom was actually in class, he was reticent. Now perhaps because he's called on more than anyone else, and because the other children have made him the most important member of their group, he's quite direct."

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