Samuel D. Rose - R & R

About this time the Col. Thought my crew should have a trip to Tel-Aviv Palestine. There was a crew there already, so we took an old discarded B24 with everything striped out, and left. The plane we took was brought back by the other crew. We landed at Lydda Airport and was taken to a nice hotel in Tel-Aviv run by the army. Tel-Aviv was a new town of 20 years. It was on the north edge of the old town of Jaffa where Jonah was cast upon the shore by the whale in the Bible Story. We were told not to go in there because we might not come back out. It had little narrow dirty streets made for animals only. I think.

Most eating places were off limits to service men because of sanitation. The one spot OKed was the American. Ice cream Bar - ran by a girl from Brooklyn. We managed to stop by a couple of times a day for a Brooklyn Special, one quart of ice cream, nuts, topping etc. We went to a night club near the beach, called Pills, where they had a floor show and orchestra. One day we hired a guide, a car, and took a trip to Jerusalem. We saw a lot of the Bible time sights such as the Church of the Nativity, Rachel's tomb, the place of the manger in Bethlehem. The church of all nations, the Wailing Wall, the garden of Gethsemane where the olive trees that Christ saw are still growing. We spent a whole day with this guide who said to call him Mr. Sad Fad because we could never pronounce it correctly in Arabic. In Bethlehem I bought some mother of pearl jewelry made in a one room factory. I saw them made, everybody sat on the floor and worked by hand on little tables. The best shells come from the west side of Catalina Island U.S.A. I bought a little velvet jacket with gold embroidery on it for Ruth. Tel-Aviv was the only place I ever saw the Roof of the theater role back for air conditioning during intermission. On the way home we stopped at Cairo to let off a few hitch hikers. On the way we seldom got over 100 feet high, buzzed sand dunes and camels. Every time that ship landed everybody had to get way back in the tail to help get the nose up because all the turrets, etc. were gone making the nose heavy at slow speed.