Frankly, the life of Teddy Kollek, who died this morning at 95, interests me more than that of the other celebrities who died recently, James Brown and Gerald Ford. Arguably, Kollek influenced the lives of more people as mayor of the city holy to the world’s three major religions:
"As one of the ‘Ben Gurion boys,’ Teddy Kollek was mostly a behind-the-scenes shaper of Israel’s history from its earliest days – until he stepped into the limelight as mayor of Jerusalem from 1965 to 1993. It was only then that his outstanding skills as a master administrator and familiar of international glitterati from Hollywood to Monaco came to the fore in his quest for support and funds to develop Israel’s backwater capital into a world-class city…Teddy gave Jerusalem, new and old, a new infrastructure, personally overseeing every detail, from garbage collection to a new sewage system to replace the 2,000-year old Roman pipes under the odoriferous Old City bazaar, while working hard to give Jew and Arab, Muslim and Christian, ultra-religious and secular communities, their place as citizens in the reunited capital."
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 