ITHACA, N.Y. -- "You could be a bricklayer," adults suggested kindly to the husky youth, Kevin Wallace, although they didn't think he even had the brains for that. And teachers were less charitable, in the days before dyslexia-type reading and learning disorders were understood, Wallace remembers: "I asked the nun how I could make the letters hold still on the page, and she said the devil was working in me."

Repeatedly punished without knowing why, he carried feelings of shame and confusion until age 28. Then Wallace confessed to his 7-year-old daughter the reason he told such marvelous bedtime stories but never read them: He couldn't read, a secret he withheld from employers, friends and even from Thea, his wife. Today, the other 76 graduates of Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine D.V.M. Class of '97 are in awe of a phenomenal power Wallace developed, while managing his learning disability. It is said he somehow absorbed so much information about veterinary medicine that he can read an ailing animal like a book. Better, actually, than a book, of which he figures he has read two.

On his way to a veterinary degree at Cornell, Wallace fulfilled one teachers' prophecy. He was a construction worker as well as a factory worker, a thoroughbred horse breeder and a wildlife rehabilitator. He helped found LEO, the Learning Enhancement Organization that spread statewide and is now a national model for disabled students who try to help peers overcome disabilities of all kinds. Wallace graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in zoology and chemistry from the State University of New York at Oswego. His homemade effort at teaching himself to read, beginning with 5-by-7 cards with holes punched through to frame the jumping letters, was beginning to pay off.

Wallace said he can't heap enough credit on his wife and children for all their help, encouragement and understanding while an adult who "couldn't learn" aspired to higher learning. Both Thea and Kevin Wallace applied for admission to the veterinary college in 1993. Only Kevin was accepted. Thea went to work as a veterinary technician in the college hospital's intensive care unit. She agreed to help support her spouse through four year of vet college, and maybe he could do the same someday.

The college's innovative medical-education curriculum didn't exactly make learning easy for a dyslexic, Wallace said. But the visually oriented, case-based way of teaching everything about all the animal species that a veterinarian needs to know "helped make it possible," he believes -- as did his remarkable ability to gather and evaluate information in a brain that lacks the neuronal connections to read the written word. A text-to-speech synthesis program on his computer makes reading somewhat easier, especially for an avid browser of the information-rich Internet.

"Mostly," Wallace said, "I talk with other people every chance I get." Unfamiliar medical terms are easier to process if he hears someone say them first. Wallace said his vocabulary has probably tripled in the past four years. And he watches the animals, the sick ones and the healthy, on the farms and in the clinics. He was a frequent observer at the intensive care unit while his wife worked there. Often Wallace comes close to making a diagnosis without touching the animal -- just by observing, by looking for signs.

The next step for Kevin Wallace is a one-year internship at a specialty clinic in Tucson. He would like to return to Cornell to do a medical residency. Starting out in a profession at 40, Wallace predicts he'll work until 80. The inborn educator in him wants to teach people how to help their pets themselves, and he won't stop helping children with disabilities struggle to attain their goals.

A year's continentwide separation from the wife who helped him through it all won't be easy, and an intern veterinarian's salary won't be much. But now it's payback time.

Thea Wallace starts veterinary college at Cornell in the fall.