Hello Lou... ("You know what you have Mary?" "No Mr. Grant, what?" "You have spunk..." "Thank you Mr. Grant." "I hate spunk." Apologies to Lou Grant and Mary Tyler Moore...Ed Asner, once president of the Screen Actors Guild put on a short-lived TV show "The Bronx Zoo" where he played a principal in a NYC school.)
When I visited last the island of my mother's father, Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, Canada, a relation from Cornwall, Ontario, Roberta Parker (nee Llywelyn, Welsh) had just returned from Jerusalem in 1988, part of Jehovah's Witnesses. One thing they do is get together, her husband Leman Parker (my great aunt Minerva Urquhart's son, named after her brother Leman Urquhart, the Savannah, GA pilot and captain of the "City of Atlanta" that left NYC and was torpedoed by the U-123 captain you interviewed, a would have been Luftwaffe pilot which we thought a little strange my mother says and hello) with other Witnesses on the island, was building a fancy house for a New Jersey inventor of "ferrochrome" chrome without chromium on iron, that we went inside to look at. Fireplace with four glass sides, rainwater reservoir and some of the rock ledge of the "Seven Days Works" geologic formation left in the bedroom.
Anyway, she had one of those very long panorama post cards of Jerusalem you might have seen, about 2 feet long or so. She said one of the problems was the wall, which Christians and others wanted to open up a rediscovered gate that would have been another footpath or road up to the Mount of Olives where the panorama picture was taken. She said the problem was that since those Biblical times a Muslim cemetery was created outside the wall after the gate had been sealed and to open it again would bring people walking over the Muslim graves. I'm not sure what that has to do with the more recent re-gilding of the Temple Mount by Jordon's King Hussein, ("Haram es Sharif" as was the torch by the French on the Statue of Liberty, my grandmother Margaret Gregory was a nanny for the caretaker there for a number of years, and I worked with the archaeologist documenting it prior to the restoration, we that is worked together at the William Floyd Manor, her sister on the "Ronson Ship" site before marrying a Micronesia legal consultant ) and the recent squabbling over the archaeology conducted next to it and under it but I thought I'd just pass along what little I know about it.
When the government gets too anti-archaeology in Israel, archaeologists show up outside, banging clay potsherds together.
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