Date (happened)
between 1929 and 1934
(possible)
passage 532967 (lecture nid 1203), 'when I was a young man in my twenties and the depression was on'; corroborated by passage 547758 (lecture nid 1882), 'back in the deep, deep days of the Depression'
Told / reported
- 4 May 1965delivery claims on lecture nid 1203: catalog #277 (certain, preferred) plus an independent chrome dateline and an internal alternating-meeting weekday pattern, all converging on 1965-05-04
- 22 March 1968delivery claims on lecture nid 1882: an independently-derived estimate from same-day Vietnam-command-change news (d1) exactly matches a recovered chrome dateline (d2), both landing on 1968-03-22
In his twenties, during the hard early years of the Depression, Neville describes going penniless one hot summer night to the old Columbus Circle in New York, where anyone could take a soapbox platform and speak to a crowd. Finding a man there denouncing the existence of God, Neville asked for the platform and spoke in defense of the Bible, drawing part of the crowd over to his side. When he stepped down afterward, he found a ten-dollar bill at his foot; when onlookers challenged that it wasn't his, he told them he'd hand it over to whoever could give him its serial number -- and kept it, since no one could.