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It may not be as important, culturally, as the question, “Where were you when President Kennedy was shot?” but it’s close:
Where were you 33 years ago when you heard that Elvis Presley died?
It was Aug. 16, 1977. I was working for the Courier-Index, a weekly newspaper in Marianna, Ark., under the tutelage of Editor-Publisher Marvin Caldwell. My high school friend, John Brummett, before making a two-day swing through the Arkansas Delta for a series he was writing for the grand, old Arkansas Gazette, called to see if I wanted to go raise some hell in Memphis.
So when Billy Wilkes, the young man who ran the office for his father’s vending-machine business next door, came walking in to tell us, “Elvis just died,” Brummett was waiting for me to finish writing a caption for a photo I just took from a family reunion. Then we were scheduled to head for Memphis. I think most of the watering holes for visitors were located in the Overton Square area in 1977.
Almost to a person, we in the Courier newsroom said something like, “You’re kidding!?!” Then Wilkes explained that they found Presley in his bathroom at Graceland and rushed him to Baptist Hospital, where he was pronounced dead of a heart attack. He was 42.
Brummett and I went on to Memphis as planned. We crossed Elvis Presley Boulevard well west of Graceland, but we could see the huge crowd gathering down the road in front of the rock ‘n’ roll king’s mansion. We decided that we would go to Overton Square as planned, but spent most of the night drinking a little and talking a lot, like most of Memphis, about Elvis and his influence.
John was not the big Presley fan that I was, but he still had his share of memories of various events and songs. I think we made it back to my house in Moro, Ark., about 4:30 the next morning.
The next few days were strange, as a local television station in Memphis — it seems like it was Channel 5, but I can’t remember now — broadcast almost everything that happened related to Presley’s death.
First there were the huge crowds that gathered en masse in front of the house, writing on the stone fence that surrounded the front part of Presley’s property. Then the guy plowed into the crowd the next day, killing two people. Next came the bedlam that ensued when the Presley family announced that they would allow mourners to line up outside in preparation for filing through the house to view Presley’s body. I don’t remember any more how many people passed by to pay their respects, but it was easily in the thousands.
Finally, it came time for the funeral procession to take the body from Graceland to a nearby cemetery where Elvis’ mother, Gladys Presley, was buried. Traffic was stopped for miles around as thousands gathered to see the procession of hearse, family and celebrity friends such as former co-star/girlfriend Ann-Margret.
It should have been over, but it wasn’t. A small group of idiots — what else do you call celebrity grave robbers — tried to steal Presley’s body from the cemetery. That act led to the eventual decision for the family to move the remains of the singer and his mother back to Graceland, where they rest to this day. Going past those graves and others in the family is the final part of the Graceland tour.
I was a fan of the music and the man in the early days. From reading about him in the past three decades, I’m not sure how likeable he was in his later years. But then, if we had lived his life, we might have taken a strange path, too.
When the clouds get black overhead in one part of Central Arkansas, it can cause a scare, if not panic, over the rest of the area.
It’s that way here Monday afternoon. My wife, Nancy, who works for a group of oncology doctors next to Baptist Health Medical Center in Little Rock, called to tell me that we needed to turn on the Weather Channel on our newsroom televisions because the dark clouds had arrived in west Little Rock. She said the wall of windows that she and her co-workers face on the north side of their building was rattling from the winds that had picked up since the building storm moved toward them.
Some of us in our offices downtown ran to the front windows. Overhead, the sky was overcast but not particularly disturbing. Looking west, though, we saw a thick layer of gray storm clouds with a blanket along the horizon that were even darker.
Nancy also instructed me to call my parents and tell them to prepare for a storm. My mother has been known to watch St. Louis Cardinals baseball games on television with storms bearing down on them in the Dixon Road area south of Little Rock until she is dragged into the hallway.
It was no different this time. After our session of look-see, I called Mom and told her that Nancy’s office was surrounded by black clouds and that she and Dad should prepare to take cover. She told me that the sun was out and that Dad was outside checking on the garden. I told her what Nancy said and that she should tell Dad to come in. (My folks listen to Nancy’s suggestions much more willingly than they do mine.)
“I’ll tell him,” she said, “but I don’t know if he’ll do it.”
Dad soon will be 75 and Mom is 73, so I guess they can do what they want when it comes to coming in out of the rain, but that means we’ll worry about it until we hear from them after the storm has passed.
I realize that storms sometimes just hit part of an area and I don’t get particularly nervous. However, my wife does — she says it’s our Lhasa apso, Daisy, that she’s concerned about, but it’s not just the dog — so that adds a bit of urgency to our life when the ridiculously large weather maps pop onto our television screens.
Better to be safe rather than sorry, I guess. And I understand the concern.
I moved to Vernon, Texas, and then to Wichita Falls, Texas, in the early 1980s. Each city had been struck by a killer tornado in 1979. Forty-six died in Wichita Falls and 13 fatalities were suffered in Vernon. At those newspapers, we went into crisis mode any time the sky got dark. An excellent weather-spotting system developed from that tornado and its aftermath and that’s what our readers wanted to know any time a threat of storms developed — what was going to happen with the weather.
My complaints will continue about television stations rationalizing their purchase of expensive computer programs for their meteorologists by breaking into my ballgames anytime a storm reaches the edge of the state map. I don’t want to know about a rainy night in Georgia or even Fort Smith or Memphis. But I do get why some people do.
Mike Dougherty's Blog 