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Final follow up on this thread, in case it might help others in the future. Photo shows the distributor, clamp, and my replacement vacuum advance that is made with the octane selector. The tips in this discussion thread were very helpful. In addition, here are a few of my personal notes.
1. Many comments in this thread provided tips to enable reassembly afterwards. I did those things. Specifically... I removed the distributor cap and turned the engine by hand until the rotor pointed at the 12 O'clock position. Then took lots of photos and a video, to help document position for reassembly. I also tried to mark the depth and position of the distributor with a paint pen, but the caked on grease made that difficult, so I just used the caked grease as my depth marker!
2. While the distributor was out I cleaned up the grease cap coming off the side of the distributor. It was locked in place, so I used gentle persuasion from channel lock pliers to remove it. Scraped out the dried up grease, cleaned up the threads, regreased the cap, and reassembled the cap to the distributor
3. The distributor reassembly to the engine was slightly tricky. I noticed the distributor did not lift straight up on disassembly, but rotated clockwise a bit. This appears to be due to the counterclockwise spiral gears on the lower end of the distributor shaft. For reassembly, I dropped the distributor straight down until it hit the ends of those spiral gears, the slightly lifted and gently wiggled the distributor, while rotating it just a bit clockwise until the gears meshed, and finally let the distributor drop into place with a slight counterclockwise rotation. Took a couple of tries to get it lined up. Made sure when I was done the rotor was pointing at 12 O'clock position.
4. Then set the depth using the caked on line of grease.
5. I set the octane selector to 0 and bolted that down.
6. I set the static timing based on the BB on the flywheel and timing pointer.
7. For the first run after reassembly, I removed the valve cover, to watch oil flow and provide independent verification that the distributor shaft was engaging the gear of the oil pump down below.
Thank you all for the helpful advice. I hope my follow up summary may help others who tackle this job in the future. Not a tough job, and does not require any special tools or training, but it does require some care at the start, to help with correct reassembly at the end.
