The man who urged Neville to hear Abdullah was David, a Fordham dropout and son of a Prohibition rumrunner who had lost his whole two-million-dollar inheritance on Wall Street in a year; Neville distrusted him and postponed for six months until one Sunday evening he ran out of excuses and went, and from that day was with Ab daily, though Ab would never take a dollar from him.
Date (happened)
c. 1931
stated · probable · preferred
1929
stated
Source
passage 551274 (lecture nid 2001), '...met a friend of mine in New York City, his name was Abdullah. He said to me in 1933 (I met him in '29)...'
Why
hist_event:15496 (an existing, unrelated-lane event for the same first meeting) carries only a circa-1931 probable date, inferred from 'about eight years ago' in a different lecture. This 1929 claim conflicts with that inference; see the filed merge_proposal.
Reasoning
Neville states the year he met Abdullah directly and unambiguously, in a parenthetical aside distinguishing it from the separate 1933 Barbados episode he goes on to describe.
Told / reported
-
after 1965
bound · probable
Source
delivery claim on lecture nid 2001 'On Drugs, Dope, Marijuana, LSD, Alcohol, Vegetarianism, Etc.'
Reasoning
The lecture's single delivery claim is only a bound: Neville speaks of Churchill (died January 1965, aged 90) as already dead, giving a firm floor of 'after 1965'. Nothing else in the transcript fixes a more specific year, so the told claim is carried through unchanged rather than sharpened into a false exact date.
Sources
Source
- Who Are the Condemned ¶51 (So when he told me he met a man that I really must hear, I postponed and postponed and postponed the going. And one day I ran out of excuses, and it was a Sunday evening, and he said, “Now you have no more excuses. I know you have no dates, so come with …)