• Some theorists believe that Elvis’s extensive work in law enforcement made him a target for drug dealers and the Mob—and that he entered the Federal Witness Protection Program out of fear for his life. According to Brewer-Giorgio, when Elvis supplied the information that sent a major drug dealer to prison, the King and his family received death threats.
Could Elvis Be in Hiding?
Hundreds of Elvis’s loyal fans think they have spotted the King since his “death.” He’s been sighted at a Rolling Stones concert, working at a Burger King in Kalamazoo, buying gas in Tennessee, and shopping for old Monkees records in Michigan. One woman even claims that Elvis gave her a bologna sandwich and a bag of Cheetos during a 1987 visit to the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. Could so many people be lying or mistaken?
According to zoologists, elephants love to eat licorice.
OTHER MYSTERIES COLLECTED BY ELVIS FANS
• Vernon Presley never went to the hospital the night Elvis “died.” If Elvis were really dead, some theorists speculate, he probably would have.
• According to some reports, within hours of Presley’s death, souvenir shops near Graceland began selling commemorative T-shirts of his death. How could they have made so many shirts in so little time—unless Graceland had let them know about the “death” in advance?
• Elvis’s middle name, Aron, is misspelled “Aaron” on his tombstone. If Elvis is really dead, why don’t his relatives correct the mistake?
• Elvis isn’t buried next to his mother as he requested. Says Brewer-Giorgio: “‘Elvis loved his mother very much and always said he would be buried beside her,’ many fans have noted. ‘So why is he buried between his father and grandmother?’ they ask.”
• On a number of occasions after the King’s death, Priscilla Presley referred to Elvis as a living legend—strange words for a woman who supposedly believes that Elvis is dead.
• Before he died, Elvis took out a multimillion-dollar life insurance policy. To date, no one in his family has tried to claim it. If Elvis’s family really believes he is dead, why haven’t they cashed in the policy?
PASSING ON
• The people who were in Elvis’s home when he died insist that he really did die. Joe Esposito, Elvis’s road manager for 17 years, was one of the first people to see the body. “Believe me, the man that I tried to revive was Elvis.”
• Elvis may even have committed suicide. According to his stepbrother David Stanley, “Elvis was too intelligent to overdose [accidentally]. He knew the Physician’s Desk Reference inside and out.” Why would Elvis take his own life? He was getting old, and the strain of his stagnating career may have become too much to bear. The pressure showed: in the last years of his life, Elvis’s weight ballooned to more than 250 pounds, and his addiction to prescription drugs had gotten out of control.
The word “Sunday” is not in the Bible.
• The impending publication of a book chronicling the King’s erratic behavior and his drug problem may have been the final straw. In August 1977, the month of his death, two of his former aides were about to publish a book revealing much of his bizarre personal life to the public for the first time. He was already depressed, and the imminent public exposure of his drug habit may have pushed him over the edge.
RECOMMENDED READING
The Elvis Files, by Gail Brewer-Giorgio (Shapolsky Publishers, 1990). A fountain of Elvis conspiracies.
HOLLYWOOD-ISMS
Some funny observations taken from Star Speak:
Hollywood on Everything, by Doug McClelland.
“In Hollywood, the executives have Picassos and Chagalls on their walls and would kill to have lunch with Chuck Norris. That’s why you have movies like Howard the Duck.”
—David Steinberg
“It is not true I was born a monster. Hollywood made me one.”
—Boris Karloff
“The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed her down the stairs in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”
—Bette Davis
“I had a dog named Duke. Every fireman in town knew that hound, because he chased all the firewagons. They knew the dog’s name, but not mine, so the next thing I was Duke, too. I was named for a damn dog!”
—John Wayne
“If the scripts were as great as the sets, what a town Hollywood would be!”
—W. Somerset Maugham
There are seven spikes in the Statue of Liberty’s crown.
A BREED APART
Ever wonder why a Dachsund is so long and skinny—or why Great Danes are so tall? The answer: They were bred with a specific purpose in mind. Here are the stories behind the names and appearances of some of the world’s most popular dog breeds.
BASSET HOUNDS. The name comes from the French adjective bas, which means “low thing.” Originally bred to hunt rabbits, raccoons, and other small mammals. Their short legs make them relatively slow runners, but they’re especially adept at chasing prey through thickets.
BULLDOGS. According to legend, in 1209 A.D. Lord William Earl Warren of Stamford, England, was looking out onto his meadow and saw two dogs fighting a bull. He so admired their courage that he gave the meadow to the townspeople—on the condition that they begin holding annual dog-bull fights. Over the next 600 years, bullbaiting became a popular sport, and the bulldog breed evolved along with it. Like pit-bulls, bulldogs were originally bred to be fearless and vicious. But in 1835, bullbaiting was banned in England. Bulldog lovers used breeding techniques to eliminate their viciousness, making them acceptable house pets.
COCKER SPANIELS. A member of the Spanyell family of dogs that dates back to the 14th century. Their small size made them ideal for hunting woodcocks, earning them the name cockers, which eventually became cocking spaniels, then cocker spaniels.
FRENCH POODLES. Actually bred in 15th-century Germany as hunting dogs. The name “poodle” comes from the German word pudeln, which means “to splash.” The reason: They’re good swimmers and were often used to retrieve game from ponds, etc.
GREAT DANES. Got their name from the French, who thought they were Danish. They weren’t: they were actually from Germany, where they were bred large enough to tackle and kill wild boars.
It takes 12 bees their entire lifetime to make a tablespoon of honey.
ROTTWEILERS. When soldiers of ancient Rome went into battle, they had no way of bringing enough fresh meat with them to last the entire campaign. So they brought cattle—and Rottweiler dogs to herd them. In 700 A.D., the local duke in an area of Germany the Romans had once occupied commissioned a Catholic church to be built near the ruins of some Roman baths. Because the baths had red tile roofs, the Duke issued instructions to build at “das Rote Wil,”—the red tiles. Later the area became known as the town of Rottweil, and the breed of dogs the Romans had left behind were called Rottweilers.
GREYHOUNDS. One of the oldest breeds of dogs; dating back as far as ancient Egypt (where they were a favorite pet of the pharoahs). Tomb paintings nearly 5,000 years old depict them hunting wild goats, deer, and other animals. According to one theory, they’re actually named after the Greeks, taking their name from the word Graius, which means Grecian or Greek.
DACHSHUNDS. Although the name is derived from the German words Dachs (badger) and Hund (dog), dachshunds have been used to hunt animals as large as wild boars. Their long bodies make them ideal for chasing badgers and rabbits through their tunnels.
BLOODHOUNDS. The bloodhound’s unrivaled sense of smell has made it one of the most popular hunting dogs in history. Dog experts believe it dates back several hundred years B.C. and was first used as a hunting dog in and around Constantinople. Its skills were so valuable that it became known as a royal, or “blooded,” hound and was a favorite pet of aristocrats.
PEKINGESE. Came from imperial China, where the purest breeds were reserved for members of the royal family. The dogs were so precious that when British troops sacked the Imperial Palace in 1860, most of the pets w
ere destroyed by their owners...who preferred killing them to surrendering them to the enemy. However one woman—the Emperor’s aunt—committed suicide before she killed her dogs, and the British found five of them hiding behind a curtain in her quarters. The dogs were brought back to England, and one was presented to Queen Victoria. She fell in love with it, and the breed immediately became popular.
The busiest pay phone in the U.S.—used over 270 times a day—is in Chicago’s main bus terminal.
ON THE LINE
Odds & ends of telephone trivia and lore, from the fabulous Bathroom Reader library.
ORIGIN OF THE PHONE NUMBER
“The early phone exchanges listed only the names of ‘subscribers’ to the service, and the operators had to memorize all of them in order to connect one to the other. The idea of a telephone number was vigorously resisted by customers as an indignity and loss of personal identification. However, during an epidemic of measles in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1880, a respected physician named Dr. Parker recommended the use of numbers because he feared paralysis of the town’s telephone system if the four operators succumbed. He felt numbers would make it easier for substitute operators to be trained. Surprisingly, no one complained...and the new system proved so practical that by 1895, official instructions to operators specified, ‘Number Please?’ as the proper response to a customer.”
—The Telephone Book, by H. M. Boettinger
MESSAGE FROM A VISIONARY
The following was sent in a letter to “the organizers of the New Electric Telephone Company” by Alexander Graham Bell on March 25, 1878. “At the present time we have a perfect network of gas pipes and water pipes throughout our large cities. We have main pipes laid under the streets [connected to] various dwellings, enabling people to draw their supplies of gas and water from a common source.
“In a similar manner it is conceivable that cables of telephone wires could be laid under ground, or suspended overhead, communicating by branch wires with private dwellings, counting houses, shops, manufactories, etc., uniting them through the main cable with a central office where the wire could be connected as desired, establishing direct communication between any two places in the city. Such a plan as this, though impracticable at the present moment, will, I firmly believe, be the outcome of the introduction of the telephone to the public...I [also] believe that in the future, wires will unite the head offices of telephone companies in different cities, and a man in one part of the country may communicate by word of mouth with another in a distant place.”
Richest charity in the U.S.: the Y.M.C.A., with $2.4 billion in revenue.
THE PRESIDENT AND THE TELEPHONE
“After the invention of the telephone in 1876, one might think that the president...would be one of the first persons to have one of the new instruments. Actually, a telephone was installed in the White House in 1877, during the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes. But that doesn’t mean that the president had a phone. The phone was not even in his office, and it was used mainly by staff members and news reporters.
“Until 1898 chief executives rarely used the telephone, and none had an instrument in his office. When the president wanted to make a phone call, he had to leave his desk and go down the hall to the phone, just like everyone else. That changed abruptly in 1898 when war broke out with Spain. With action on two fronts, in Cuba and the Philippines, the president was suddenly faced with the need for more rapid communications than could be effected by the old methods.
“Accordingly, [a technician] was brought to the White House to install a communications center...[which] provided President Mckinley with private telephone lines to the War and Navy departments...There was also a direct line to Tampa, Florida, the primary staging area for the invasion of Cuba.” That was the first time the telephone was deemed absolutely essential at 1600 Pennsylvanian Avenue.
—The Telephone and Its Several Inventors, by Lewis Coe
EARLY TELEPHONE ETIQUETTE
“The subscriber has the right to expect the first word from the operator to be always ‘Number?’ to which the word ‘Please’ had better be added, but is not absolutely required.
“The subscriber has the right to expect the operator, if necessary, to say, ‘That line is busy’; simply ‘Busy’ won’t do.
“The operator has a right to expect that the subscriber will have the number ready when the operator answers, and that the operator will not be compelled to wait while the subscriber looks it up in the directory.
Michael Jackson was awarded his first gold record when he was 11 years old.
“Also that the subscriber will give the number in a a clear and distinct voice, and if the operator misunderstands a number, that she will be corrected, without evidence of anger in the tone of the subscriber”
—Telephone Etiquette, published in 1905
OLDIES BUT GOODIES
• “New York City’s first phone directory was issued in 1878. It was a small card with a printed list of 271 names. Almost a century later, 44 of the businesses listed in that first directory were still in operation, four of them at the very same address.”
• Early rural telephone wires were strung across just about anything that was standing—not only telephone poles, but windmills, silos, and even fence posts. In fact, it was fairly common for phone conversations to sputter and die out as a result of cattle rubbing against the fence lines.”
• “Back in 1909, when 18,000 calls were placed daily between New York and Chicago (earning Bell $22,000, seven times a week), a special long distance salon was opened in Manhattan. To entice Paying customers and get them into the ‘long-distance habit,] the New York Telephone company sent taxis to pick them up and bring them to the salon, whereupon they were escorted over oriental carpets to a gilded booth draped with silk curtains.”
—The What to While You’re Holding
the Phone Book, by Gary Owens
THE BIRTH OF THE PAY PHONE
“It started at home, where families subscribed to telephone service and paid a monthly bill to lease the company’s instrument. This phone was off-limits to nonsubscribers, however. And early on, there were plenty of these. How, then, to summon the doctor? The police? The fire department? What would happen if a phoneless neighbor used another’s phone? Who paid? How? How much? And what if it was three in the morning?
“With problems ranging from bookkeeping to friend keeping, it was essential that telephones be made accessible to all. Thus the first public pay station in the world went into service on June 1, 1880, in the office of the Connecticut Telephone Company in New Haven....For ten cents, paid to a uniformed attendant, anyone could talk to anyone.
Survey results: 31% of American women say they wear only comfortable shoes.
“Soon, however, the coin-operated telephone was invented by William Gray. According to legend, Mr. Gray had been turned away by cold-hearted neighbors when he sought to use their telephone to call a doctor during a family emergency. Determined not to let it happen again—to himself or other ‘phoneless people’—he patented and built ‘the first coin-controlled apparatus for telephones.’ It was installed in the Hartford Bank in 1889.”
—Once Upon a Telephone,
by Ellen Stern and Emily Gwathmey
LEARNING TO DEAL WITH THE TELEPHONE
1917: “Another hall abomination is a telephone. Unless we want our guests to know the price of their roast, or the family to listen aghast while we tell a white lie for society’s sake, or the cook to hear us asking for a new one’s references, don’t put your telephone in the hall closet it, or keep it upstairs, where the family alone are the bored ‘listeners in.’”
—Interior Decoration for Modern
Needs, by Agnes Foster Wright
1927: “...Then the telephone. Children usually love to use it ad they should be taught to speak courteously on the pain of not being allowed to answer it. Children commit all sorts of discourtesies over the telephone if not checked and one often hears the c
asual ‘Yep’ and ‘What?’ and ‘Wait.’”
—Good Manners for Children,
by Elsie C. Mead and Theordora Mead Abel
The 1940s: “When you have finished your telephone visit, and courteously said ‘good-bye’ or ‘thank You,’ replace the receiver gently. Slamming the receiver might cause a sharp crack in the ear often person with whom you have been talking. Since you would not ‘slam the door’ after an actual visit, be just as careful in closing you telephone door.
—You and Your Telephone,
distributed by the New York Telephone Company
The state song of Florida is “Old Folks at Home.”
SOUNDS PHONY
“When the Bell system introduced push-button phone service, it could hardly have anticipated that the push-button phone would become America’s most popular new musical instrument.
“Each of the buttons produces a different musical tone. If you punch out 33363213, you’ll get a respectable rendition of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head”; 005883 plays the first bars of “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony”; and 1199009 gives you “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” It’s unwise to try it, however, unless you call a friend first for the recital, because otherwise you might find yourself inadvertently serenading someone expensively by long distance.”
—The What to Do While You’re Holding
the Phone Book, by Gary Owens
THE HISTORY OF “DIAL-A-PRAYER”
“Around 1955 (long before answering machines were available), a number of churches—notably the Hitchcock Memorial Presbyterian church in Scarsdale, New York—began broadcasting brief recorded prayers continuously by phone; after the Hitchcock’s service had been publicized in a local newspaper, there was such a backlog of calls that the Scarsdale telephone system became temporarily jammed. By 1956 so many Dial-A-Prayer services were being offered by churches around the nation that Time magazine said they had become ‘almost a characteristic feature of U.S. religion.’
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