In the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s, Dr. Wesley Wilkerson practiced medicine as an Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat doctor in Nashville, Tennessee. He was most concerned for his pediatric patients with hearing loss and was very frustrated with the lack of intervention services for deaf and hard of hearing children, who are expected to live at home or in an institution and have very little independence as adults. Dr. Wilkerson was married to Fawn Parent Wilkerson and had three children: Bill, Nancy Fawn and Jane. In January of 1945, Bill was killed in the Battle of the Bulge when he volunteered for dangerous duty as a forward observer.

In the 1940’s, Dr. Wilkerson attended several conferences where he hears Mrs. Spencer Tracey speak about her son, a profoundly deaf child who had, with early intensive intervention, learned to speak. He became determined to create a place where any child with hearing loss could come to learn to speak and communicate in order to have a much better chance at education, employment and a normal life. In 1949, Dr. Wilkerson organized a board of directors and chartered the “Tennessee Hearing and Speech Foundation”.

Two years later, in 1951, the Foundation opened a clinic in an old fraternity house on the Vanderbilt campus, hiring audiologist Dr. Freeman McConnell as its first director. In a secret meeting, the board of directors voted to name the Nashville clinic after Dr. Wilkerson’s son, Bill, as a memorial and a tribute to the Wilkerson family. In subsequent years, the Foundation was instrumental in opening seven more hearing and speech Centers across the state of Tennessee. Dr. Wilkerson also worked with Vanderbilt University to start a training program for hearing and speech professionals. The first class of audiologists and speech-language pathologists graduated in 1953. This was the beginning of a long-term educational and research relationship the Center has with Vanderbilt.

In the early 1950’s, the board started plans to build a more permanent facility. Mrs. Lucille Clement, wife of the current governor, spearheaded efforts with the Tennessee State Legislature to pass a bond issue to fund the construction of a new facility. In 1956, ground was broken for the new building which was completed in 1958 and is considered the most state-of-the-art clinic of its kind in the world. The new facility also contained a number of research labs, including an anechoic chamber, which enabled the Center to expand its research program.

In the 1960’s, the Center expanded the scope of its mission to treat very young children with hearing loss. Working on the new-found belief that children learn language at a more rapid rate as toddlers and preschoolers, the Center opened a demonstration project to train parents to provide ongoing language stimulation in the home environment. In 1972, The Mama Lere Home was built to house the Parent-Infant Training Program. Families came from across the southeast to participate in the program. Also during this era, the Center was home to the Nashville Public Schools Hearing Impaired Preschool.