Roger Pulvers

Two very close friends.

Hopefully Western readers will come to love him as much as I do.

Well, I was, in the beginning, I wasn't drawn to Lafcadio.

And let me give a little bit of background because some listeners may not know him very well.

He was born in 1850 on the island of Lefkas in Japan.

Greece to a Greek mother and an Irish father.

And at age two, his mother and father brought him to Dublin in 1852, just when the great famine was hitting Ireland.

But they were quite well off.

They were Protestants.

The father was a surgeon in the British army.

And he left.

And in fact, he got the marriage annulled.

And he was what we used to call a scallywag.

And his mother, Lafcadio's mother, didn't speak English.

She was illiterate as well and she went back to Greece.

and left Lafcadio with a great aunt who was very pious.

And he grew up there, and she didn't know what to do.

He was a hyperactive boy.

At school, at age 16, he lost the sight of one eye, and she sent him off to France.

And at age 19, he just left Britain, the United Kingdom, and he went to the United States and spent many years in Cincinnati and New Orleans and became a very interesting person