STOCKTON, CALIF. — The phone is ringing. It`s Adelaide, Australia, calling the residence here of 85-year-old Edmund Paul Halley (rhymes with jolly). Halley has to turn down the television to take the call--he`s watching himself stump the panel on a tape of the Canadian television quiz show ``The Front Page Challenge.``
Adelaide wants to chat, for the benefit of a Down Under radio audience, with the man who ``owns`` Halley`s Comet, and who, on some dark, clear, moonless night this coming March or April, will pass on the astronomical ball of ice and dust to three of his great-grandchildren.
Halley`s wayward comet, which is now playing a return engagement on your local horizon after a 75-year hiatus, was named for an earlier Edmond Halley
(who spelled his first name with an O.)
That Halley was Britain`s second royal astronomer, who in 1705 correctly predicted that his comet--last seen in 1682--would return in 1758, thereby establishing the periodic nature of comets.
This Halley is a crusty, retired physician (an Evanston Township High School graduate, class of 1916) who worked his way through Northwestern University Medical School as a Chicago cabbie on the graveyard shift.
``Got shot at a couple times outside Big Jim Colosimo`s place under the El down on 22d Street,``he allows, and grins. ``I`ve forgotten which one of my years in medical school was the St. Valentine`s Day Massacre.``
The astronomer Halley hailed from Derbyshire. He was the grandson of a haberdasher, son of a soap boiler and land owner, and he was tall and lean, with an intellectual`s stare and a sharp, angled nose. The present one also traces his roots to Derbyshire, through six or eight generations of American Halleys in Virginia and Kentucky, but he has the twinkly blue eyes and pugnacious visage of a Toby mug.
The earlier Halley was a colleague of Isaac Newton`s and a confidant of kings--in 1698, Peter the Great so enjoyed his conversation that he ignored rank and admitted the commoner astronomer/mathemati cian to his dinner table. The current Halley is a mischievous imp of a man, one who could, with a little less trimming of his snowy white beard, stand in for another plump, white-haired gentleman this week. Santa, however, would be hard put to pull anything as dazzling out of his bag as the 10,000-billion-ton heavenly body that has astonished and delighted humans every 75 or so years since at least 240 B.C., when the Chinese first took note.
The last time around, in 1910, one of the human multitude was a little boy standing on a hill near Kalamazoo, Mich., with his father and grandfather. ``The comet was on its way back from the sun,`` recalls Halley, who was that little boy. ``The thing I didn`t understand at the time was the fact the tail was not behind the head of the comet but was running out ahead of it.
(The back-to-front appearance is due to solar winds and the fact the comet travels in the opposite direction from the Earth`s spin). It was a white star- color, and about as long as the handle of the Big Dipper. You couldn`t miss it.``
``My grandfather was a farmer from Boonesborough, Ky. My father was a preacher then in Kalamazoo. We didn`t have to get very far from home to see the comet. In those days the streetlights didn`t give you much of a problem. It was May or June, I don`t quite remember, but I do recall that suddenly my grandfather turned to me and said, `Your daddy won`t be around when the comet comes again, so I might as well just give it to you now.` ``
The torch was passed.
``Of course, I had no idea he had no legal right to toss it around,`` his grandson now says with a chuckle.
The little boy was awed that his grandfather would put such faith in him. The grown man now knows he doesn`t really have any formal or legal claim on the comet, but at 85 he doesn`t care that others might think he`s merely a kind of grandiose celestial squatter. ``I`m not going to fight the scientists --I`m doing this solely for family purposes,`` he harrumphs.
Sometime before March or April, when the comet will be most visible in the northern hemisphere, he`s going to have the family lawyer draw up a ``lien of sorts, with a summary of how I got involved with the comet through my granddaddy.`` Then the family--two children, five grandchildren, their spouses, and the great-grandchildren--and a local NBC affiliate from Stockton will hike to a windy hilltop north of San Francisco. There, under the light of the comet and the stars, Great-granddad will perform some sort of comet passing ceremony he hasn`t yet worked out. ``Something that will make the kids remember.``