From Israel to Palos Park

Sorry to hear about the death in your family, Uncle Ken.

All I know about Israel's recent election is that some yahoo promised to annex the West Bank if he was re-elected.  Well, why not?  Israel has been occupying it since 1967 and won't give it back until the Palestinians recognize Israel's right to exist.  That will never happen, so why not make it official?  The West Bank should have been part of Israel in the first place, but the United Nations, in it's infinite wisdom, decided to gerrymander it into part of the proposed Palestinian State, which never came to be.

There wasn't exactly a no man's land by the Berlin Wall.  West Berlin used the land right up to the wall for streets and buildings.  There was a cleared strip of land on the East side which was commonly called the "Death Strip" that was mined and guarded to keep people away from the wall.  A deer or wild hog would occasionally trip a mine or a flare, so I suppose there were rabbits there as well.  West Berlin had an extensive park system called the Grunewald that somewhat resembled the Cook County Forest Preserves, and wildlife had free run of it.  We used it for training, but not on the weekends because that's when the locals had free run of it.

Speaking of the Cook County Forest Preserves, the more I think of it, Dan Ryan Woods was only part of it.  Other parts had different names, and I don't remember which part had the toboggan slides, but it was near the Village of Palos Park where my parents lived.  There also was Palos Heights and Palos Hills, but I think they were separate communities.  There may have been an actual park called Palos Park as well, and maybe that's where the slides were located.