Word: gibran
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first the villagers reacted in kind, but as Gibran became a cult hero of the young, royalty income mounted to a current $300,000 a year. The town dissolved into political, legal and physical fighting for control of the money...
...Kahlil Gibran's 1923 view of money matters, as spelled out in The Prophet, may have had some roots in his memories of the rough-and-tumble commerce practiced in his native village of Bsharri, Lebanon. Eight years later, when the author lay dying of tuberculosis in St. Vincent's Hospital in New York, he scribbled a one-page will in which he bequeathed the royalties from seven books to the people of Bsharri. After all, the books were not selling very well; they would bring a few thousand dollars a year to the relatively poor town...
Like most of Lebanon's mountain villages, Bsharri (population about 10,000) is run by the leading members of its major families. Each of those seven families named one member to a committee that quietly administered the Gibran estate. When the Gibran boom started in the '50s, however, committee membership suddenly became a source of political power. Any goatherd who sought assistance from the estate became politically indebted to the member who sponsored him. And financial kickbacks were not unheard of either. Soon families split apart in the clamor to win a committee position. Age-old feuds gained...
...confusion, Gibran's sister Marianna, who lived in Boston until her death last month at 94, sought to win control of the copyrights as each one came due for renewal. In defense of their inheritance, the villagers of Bsharri retained New York Lawyer George Shiya, a Lebanese-American, and Shiya won the long legal battle for them. Then he claimed his agreed-upon fee-25% of all royalties from the renewed copyrights, a sum that could amount to perhaps $1,000,000. At a cost of still more legal fees, the Bsharri villagers fought Shiya...
...gaiety of the wedding. Tricia and Eddie will exchange vows in a ten-minute service presided over by the Rev. Edward Gardiner Latch, a Methodist who is the Nixons' old family pastor and chaplain of the House of Representatives. While hardly venturesome as the new improvisational weddings go?Kahlil Gibran will not be recited?the service will be mildly ecumenical. There will be Episcopal (Ed is an Episcopalian) as well as Methodist and Catholic prayers...