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Elvis died at Graceland, August 16, thirty-three years ago, at the age of 42. When I heard the news I was sitting with my mother in the sunroom of my house in Westchester County. I was unhappy in my first marriage.  It was hot. New York was in a major slump, filled with graffiti. It was the summer before the Son-of-Sam serial killer.

Elvis Presley's death -- on a toilet -- was one of those world moments people who were living then still remember, and one of the ways of dying that people remember. There were a spate of celebrity deaths around that time -- heart attacks all, but all cloaked in odd endings. The year before, Mama Cass of the Mamas and Papas was rumored to have choked on a ham sandwich. Nelson Rockefeller died not that long after while screwing his girlfriend in his NYC townhouse across from MOMA, and paramedics found him hastily dressed with his shoes on the wrong feet.

Anyway, Elvis' music was my first music. I remember him wiggling on The Ed Sullivan show, his lower half cut off by the camera. I remember how "Don't Be Cruel" stirred something in me that I never had felt before.

When I was a teen I went to a dance and won Elvis’ first Sun album as a raffle prize. Years later, I would sell that album at a garage sale for a dollar. (Big mistake.) 

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I went in search of Elvis trivia on a recent press trip to Memphis. The trip was filled with special things: catfish, fried chicken, ribs, small town church suppers, Civil War reenactments, Beale street garage bands, The Civil Rights museum, a cruise on the Mississippi, rockabilly music, broom makers, Sheriff Buford Pusser’s daughter—Pusser is a local legend who fought bullies.

But the thing that intrigued me, of course was the legend/country boy who starred in Hollywood and Las Vegas, but who stayed in Tennessee. I wanted to see where he lived and played. To meet those who knew him. And I found out dozens of factoids in Memphis, at museums and talking to folks who knew him when -- which I cross-checked on Wikipedia.

This is a long piece, but for those still fascinated by the trivia surrounding Elvis, it may be worth at least a skim because there are interesting facts here that you probably don't know:

As most of us know, Elvis grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi about 90 miles from Memphis. He was a mama's boy, an identical twin whose brother died at birth.

Ten-year-old Elvis first performed publically at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show, singing "Old Shep,” which he later recorded. But he didn’t win the contest. That might have done it for me if I couldn’t even win a contest at a dairy show. But he was undaunted.

Elvis received an acoustic guitar for his eleventh birthday, although people say he had hoped for a bicycle. He taught himself to play a few chords of blues and gospel.

At Humes High School Elvis met Red West, an early member of the Memphis Mafia, a posse that surrounded the legend throughout his career. Early on they accompanied him to music clubs on Beale street to hear the blues, rockabilly and gospel. 

Locals all said that Elvis was a polite kid –and a polite man -- and some old-timers remember that as a teenager he mowed lawns. In 1950, when he was 15, he ushered at the Loew’s theatre in Memphis, which got him close to a stage, but his early work history does not predict greatness.

He made rocket shells, worked briefly at an upholstery shop, and at a furniture manufacturer. He was also a “shabbos goy.”  He would take care of duties like turning on the lights on Friday nights through Saturday, for his friend, a local rabbi.

But even then, as a portent of Vegas Elvis, someone at the Tennessee Employment Office in 1953 wrote that Elvis was a “rather flashily dressed playboy type.” No sequined white suits yet, I presume.

In 1954, Elvis filed his first income tax return as a “semi-skilled laborer,” and he earned under a thousand dollars. Four years later, he earned over a million a year.

Elvis drove a truck, earning $1.25 an hour, and was taking evening classes to become an electrician when he first came into Sun Records. I stood on the spot where he recorded his first song, a supposed birthday gift to his mother, and I stood at the microphone where he sang it, He paid Sam Philips $4 to cut the record –one copy.

(A couple of years ago I also stood in Studio B in Nashville, where Elvis recorded many of his later songs. Both places are left the way they were then, with linoleum floors and white acoustic tiles and old sound engineering equipment.  They feel like shrines.)

Fast-talking Memphis disc jockey Dewey Philips was the first to play an Elvis record on the radio. It was 'That's All Right'" and Dewey played it 17 times in a row.

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RCA paid Sam Phillips $35,000 plus a $5,000 bonus to Elvis. Sam Phillips needed the money to promote his other singers. He went with Carl Perkins, and "Blue Suede Shoes." Both were talents, but Elvis was the one who made it really big.

According to one local, the girls adored him, but when he was discharged from the army in 1960 he brought 16-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu to stay in Graceland until they married  in 1967. He forced her to dye her hair as black as his own and wear heavy makeup. After the birth of Lisa Marie exactly 9 months after the wedding ceremony, it’s written that he was never intimate with Priscilla again. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1973.

I sat in the back booth Elvis preferred at The Arcade, his Memphis hang-out restaurant, and sampled one of  his favorite meals: a peanut butter and banana sandwich fried in butter (!), washed down with a Pepsi. According to the owner, other Elvis favorites included fried grits, lemon meringue pie and popsicles. The sandwich was delicious, by the way! But I can see how slim Elvis became fat Elvis.

The Arcade's fried peanut butter and banana sandwich -- probably a whole weeks' points on Weight Watchers

Elvis was a truly handsome man, but some say that in the mid-1970s, when he was around 40, he had a face-lift and a nose job. But by then, his weight was literally over-the-top.

Graceland looks imposing in photos with its grand columns, but it’s not that big—certainly smaller than many McMansions today. The grounds are small, and his gravesite is oddly adjacent to his swimming pool. The upstairs, where he died on the toilet, is closed to visitors, and kept pretty much the way it was on his last day there.

Here are some other odd facts/rumors I gleaned about Elvis on that Memphis trip, and after, digging around the Net:

-- Elvis had a crush on Elizabeth Montgomery (Bewitched) and wanted her to co-star with him. She was married to an actor named Gig Young, and there was tension on the set when Elvis and Gig were in the same movie and Elizabeth would visit.

-- He recorded over 600 songs, but never wrote one by himself. His gift, besides his look, was the ability to sing in a white voice that sounded black.

-- He won three Grammys, all for gospel songs.

-- Elvis learned all the words to "Rebel Without A Cause" and in Hollywood, sought out Natalie Wood because of her connection to James Dean. That relationship ended when Natalie visited Graceland and Elvis' mother Gladys supposedly drove Natalie away. Natalie confided to her sister Lana that "he can sing, but he can't do much else."

-- The first of many Cadillacs that he gave away was to his mother; it was blue and he had it painted pink. One of these cars is displayed in Memphis. Elvis gave $1,000 or more annually to each of 50 Memphis-area charities, and other donations in Memphis and around the country, most of them kept secret.

-- Aside from three concerts in Canada, Elvis never performed outside the United States.

Elvis may be long gone, but the legend lives. And right now, Memphis is in the center of Broadway hits. Tony-award winner for best play, "Memphis," deals with the black sound crossing over to white listeners, just as Elvis adapted it. And “Million Dollar Quartet," focuses on the time that Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash recorded an impromptu session together in that same studio at Sun Records where I just stood a few weeks ago.

That studio, with Elvis' mic, is below: