My "Da Vinci Code" moment--in 1974! (Warning--long)

My family, in the summer of 1974, were vacationing in northern New England. I was preparing for my senior year of college, we were watching Nixon crash and burn, and life seemed pretty good. In a cabin near ours was a very old man, in his 80s...and he and I became friends. We'd talk history and politics and philosophy, cool stuff like that, and he was a very knowledgeable person, always with his own slant on things. Occasionally, I'd mention my interest in historical mysteries, and he'd always listen very carefully, letting me talk and not giving his own opinions very much. One day, he showed me a picture of an old tower and I asked where it was, and he said, "Newport". I was surprised, because it looked very European, and I asked how old it was. "It was there when Columbus came," he said. "The Knights Templar built it."
Well--to put it, politely, I was shocked, and asked the old gentleman how he knew this. "Because my family helped build it," he said, and I felt gooseflesh prickling all over my skin. He then told me a remarkable story. He said that he was supposed to tell this to his oldest son, but his only child was killed in World War II before he turned 21, and therefore he was telling me, because he thought someone should know the truth before he died. Briefly, when he turned 21, back before 1914 sometime, his father told him a strange story--that their family was descended from members of the original Jerusalem Church, the one founded by Jesus and run by his brother James after the Crucifixion. He said that Paul and the other apostles basically hijacked Christianity, and turned it into something that Jesus never intended, and that after the Jewish Revolt in 70 AD they--the "true" Christians, who were of course Jews--had to go underground, and that they had been a small, in-bred group living inside Western Civilization ever since.
My informant told me that he had trouble believing this at first, but his father was very serious, and gave him enough proof to make him believe it. He also said that his father gave him a way of recognizing other members of their group, but that he--the old man--had only been personally contacted a few times, and that those contacts had ended after the war. He implied that some of them had chosen the wrong side, and had had some ambiguous connections to the Nazis--which seems odd, since they were after all of Jewish origin originally...but that that was the last he had had any word of them, anyway. He had also, as a young man, learned something of their history from people who knew more than his father did, but that apart from those contacts, the group hadn't really affected his life very much.
After all this time, it's hard to remember exactly what he said...but here's what I can recall, what he said, and more importantly, perhaps, what he *didn't* say. He said that Jesus and Mary Magdalen *were* married, and had children, but that the various family trees got all intertwined after a few centuries, and that no one today claimed any sort of royal descent from Jesus himself. He said that Mary did go to Gaul after the Crucifixion, and that they--Jesus' ancestors--*did* have some connection to the Merovingians. I don't remember exactly what he said about this, but he didn't make any big deal about it, it was just something he mentioned in passing. He did say that the Knights Templar were at the least infiltrated by "them", and that they did dig up ancient secrets of the Old Jerusalem Church in the 12th century, and that they still existed today. He did *not* specifically mention any hiding place that I can recall, nothing about Rosslyn, or Rennes-le-Chateau, and in particular nothing about any so-called "Priory of Sion". On the other hand, he did tell me that "they" did have some significant influence on the history of Europe at various times, always behind the scenes of course, and that they "had" been persecuted occasionally by the Catholic Church, who still feared them.
The old gentleman died quite soon after that summer, and I've kept my silence. I studied these issues as best I could, but in the 70s very little of this was in the public prints. When the book "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" came out in 1982, I was of course startled, and then for some years I thought that it had answered all my questions, and I frankly gave the matter little thought for a long time. Then doubts emerged about that book's thesis, and in particular the "Priory of Sion" seemed to be definitely exposed as a modern hoax, though they must have had some input from my old friend's people...some people--see, for instance, the new book by Picknett and Prince, "The Sion Revelation"--seem to feel the whole Merovingian business has been established as a hoax, too. But my friend definitely mentioned them in 1974, long before any of this became public...for what it's worth. The Newport tower, and Henry Sinclair's voyage to America in 1399, have also been well established, at least as far as I'm concerned. Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins have written a series of books on what they call "Rex Deux", and this comes closest to what I was told in 1974--but I've found these books to have some dubious elements themselves, and what they say doesn't jibe precisely with what I was told. But after time, and as families branch out in all directions, details can get lost, and I don't doubt but that they have been privy to similar information that I received.
So--no mysterious world-girdling conspiracies...but some very definite family and historical traditions, that *seem* to have played a role in the history of Western Civilization. As far as I'm concerned, the main effect has been to look at all history books with a jaundiced eye. I have reason to think that history, or at least some of it, is very different from what we have been told...it's hearsay, but good hearsay, in that this old man wasn't snowing me--when he told me about these things, nothing in the world existed but his voice and the mental pictures he could conjure up...and so much *has* been confirmed in the years since then...I honestly don't know what to make of it, even now...but with the Da Vinci Code business, I thought it might be worth sharing...