Sarkisian has had an extraordinary life -- full of art and music and the admiration of millions. That life began in 1921 in Massachusetts, where he was born to Armenian-American parents. His father had come to the United States in 1901, when he was about 15, and his mother came a few years later. At that time, Boston was a major port of entry for immigrants from Europe, and Sarkisian's parents, after they met and married, settled not far away, in the town of Lawrence.

Young Leo always loved art, especially drawing. His family was poor, so he used what he could find - leftover chalk from the blackboards at school, pieces of charcoal, and brown paper grocery bags to draw on. He even used old window shades as canvases. After graduating from high school, he took his drawings to the Vesper George School of Art in Boston, one of the best art schools in the city. They were so impressed that they gave him a scholarship for the entire three years.

Just as he was finishing art school, with a degree in illustration, the United States entered World War II, and Leo volunteered. In order to take advantage of his drawing skills, the U.S. Army assigned him to its Corps of Engineers in a topographic unit. He went with this unit to North Africa, where he began drawing maps of proposed landing sites in Italy. After drawing maps for later landings at Anzio and in southern France, Leo went all the way up to the Battle of the Bulge, then into Austria and finally Germany. Wherever he was, he was always sketching, putting down on paper the soldiers and events he saw around him.

When the war ended, he went to live in New York City, in a one-room apartment just north of Greenwich Village, an area bursting with creative people at that time. He worked as a freelance artist, doing illustrations and covers for magazines and books. After working all day on his illustrations, he would go every night to the New York Public Library to read everything he could find on world music. He had grown up listening to Middle Eastern music and had loved it, in addition to his art. He had played clarinet in his high school band and orchestra, but was always drawn to the musics of other cultures.

The more he studied, the more he realized how little most people in the United States knew about the music of the rest of the world. He wrote a paper that he hoped would help fill this gap in knowledge and showed it to a friend, who sent it to Irving Fogel, president of Tempo Records in Hollywood. One day, Leo heard a knock on his apartment door. He opened it and saw a tall man in a fancy sport jacket with a feather in his hat. "Very Hollywood," says Leo with a laugh. It was Irving Fogel, who had read Leo's paper and then flown all the way to New York from California to meet him. Fogel said, "You're the very person we've been looking for," and offered him a job in Hollywood.

"In just those few seconds," Leo says, "I completely changed my career."

He accepted the offer, then met and married a young Armenian woman named Mary from Massachusetts, who also loved music and art. They then moved to California, to begin a new life. Leo learned everything he could about recording and how to repair sound equipment. A year later, in 1953, his boss said, "You're ready now," and sent Leo and his wife, a jeep, and a load of recording equipment to Pakistan. There, Leo worked for a while with the music director of Radio Pakistan, traveling around with him recording music.

Later in 1953, he and Mary drove across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, where they spent the next few years going all over the country in search of the music Leo wanted to record. He picked up the language spoken there -- Farsi, or Persian -- quite easily, he says. He had grown up speaking Turkish and Armenian, as well as English, and while he was in northern Africa, had studied and learned to speak Arabic. With that background, it took him only a couple of months to become fluent in Persian.

At that time -- the 1950s -- the countries of Africa were just gaining their independence, and Fogel thought it was time for the Sarkisians to go there. In 1958, he sent them, their jeep, and a new load of equipment to Ghana, where Leo recorded an album called "New Sounds from a New Nation." He was in Ghana for about a year, then drove up to Guinea with his wife Mary, where he spent the next three and a half years recording music and drawing the people he met.

The new U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, named Edward R. Murrow, the famous CBS broadcaster, to be head of the U.S. Information Agency. Murrow, who was very much interested in the newly emerging countries of Africa, made his first trip to the continent in 1963. Having heard about Leo from his friend Irving Fogel, Murrow went to see Leo at his apartment in Conakry, Guinea. Murrow talked with Leo, listened to some of his African music, and - "then and there," says Leo - asked him to come work for the Voice of America. "You'll make less money than you could with Tempo Records," Murrow told him, "but I guarantee you'll have a wonderful time." For the next six years, he was music director for VOA in Monrovia, Liberia, traveling over the continent recording music and drawing faces.

Before going on a trip, then as now, Leo always did his homework - reading, talking with people, studying, listening. Therefore, he always knew exactly which villages he wanted to visit, whom he wanted to see and hear, what instruments and which music he wanted to record. Using English, or French, which he also speaks, he was able to talk with almost everyone he met.

"The lucky thing was," he says, "I had all the time I wanted for these trips. I was never in a rush. Too many other people would go somewhere for a couple of weeks, and what they would come back with was so superficial. I wanted to know all about the deep-down cultural differences, and for that you need time." In 1965, after two years of extensive recording, Leo went on the air with his program, "Music Time in Africa." This was what Murrow had hoped for when he hired Leo. "He realized that if we were going to broadcast to Africa, we needed to have African music," Leo says. "He was so far ahead of his time."

When the Program Center in Liberia closed in 1969, Leo moved his operation to VOA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., where he continues to produce and broadcast his weekly show. He and his partner, program announcer Rita Rochelle, who has been with him since 1978, plan each show based on what Leo knows about his audience from all the time he has spent on the continent he loves so well. Clearly, that audience loves him right back. He receives a large amount of fan mail, hundreds and hundreds of letters each month. He opens, reads, and answers every one. "Your music continues as a unifying force for peoples of different races," says a recent note from a listener. "'Music Time in Africa' is the most interesting program on radio because it makes us proud of our roots," says another.

Leo still visits Africa as often as he can, and everywhere he goes, he takes his sketchbooks with him, capturing the faces of the people he meets. He sketches very quickly, in pencil at first, doing as many as 35 or 40 views of a particular person. "Lots and lots," he says. He also makes brief notes about color. Then when he gets home and goes to his drawing board, he puts everything together, working from the sketches and from his memory of what he saw. "The thing I try to capture is the expression on a face," he says, "so that someone seeing the drawing can know that person. People sometimes say my drawings are so real, almost like a photograph, but I think they are much more than a photograph. They contain a sense of the person that comes through in the drawing because of the understanding I have of that person. I know what is there inside, and I want the viewers to see it, too."

One critic has said that, in each drawing, Leo has "frozen a moment of truth."

Exactly so.