Thanks for the wisdom. I took another look and you appear to be correct. I obviously thought there was more room than there is. That said, I think it still may be possible to do something similar using stacking headers like those from Adafruit to lift the board up. The resistor or diode could be built into a modified header I think. I may give that a try since I have a couple of sets ordered (for no particular reason except it looked like something that one should have around).
Jerry