His friend Benny, present in the room that night, told him of a black actor, David Moses, who was about to quit the theatre until he read Neville's book Out of This World; Neville autographed a book for him with Blake's line about the fool persisting in his folly, and within weeks the man got the Greyhound commercial and then pictures, TV spots, a Diahann Carroll appearance and a Danny Thomas pilot.
Date (happened)
between 1966 and 1967
unresolved
between 1966 and 1967
stated · preferred
between 1966 and 1967
estimated · possible
Reasoning
Passage 527196 places David Moses’s reading of ‘Out of This World’ ‘a little while ago, it might have been say two or three years ago’ before the telling. The lecture’s delivery date, 1969-02-17, is certain (legacy catalog #515 independently corroborated by the transcriber’s own chrome dateline ‘2/17/69’, agreeing exactly). Two to three years before 1969-02-17 spans 1967 down to 1966. Weakest link: this is a doubly-hedged (‘might have been’, ‘say’) and doubly-mediated account — David Moses told Benny, who told Neville the same day Neville related it — so confidence is possible and no month/day is claimed; the range is kept rather than collapsed to a single circa year because Neville’s own words give two explicit candidate values.
Told
-
17 February 1969
estimated
Reasoning
Passage 527196 is where Neville recounts this story, in ‘The Rock’, delivered 1969-02-17. That date is independently corroborated by the legacy catalog (#515) and the transcriber’s own removed chrome dateline ‘2/17/69’, two independent sources agreeing exactly. Weakest link: the catalog source alone is state=legacy_unreviewed, but it does not stand alone here. || v1.1 type repair: written as `stated` by run v1.1/l4/actor417/6000-6999-b1, retyped `estimated` — the claim cites node 109, not a passage, so it is this lane's inference rather than something Neville said in so many words (#2117).
Sources
Source
- The Rock ¶14 (So Benny came to me and told me that this is what he said. The man’s name, by the way, is David Moses. Benny gave me a book to autograph for him and he said, write something in it. Well, I only wrote one little thought from William Blake: “If the fool wo…)