Elvis Blog – Post #7

DATELINE: Amelia Island (near Jacksonville, Florida)
Remembering Thursday 2 August 2012

ELVIS QUOTE:
“We had nothing before. Nothing but a hard way to go.”

ELVIS TRIVIA:
Elvis played a singing rodeo rider in what 1965 movie. What was his character name?

ELVIS HISTORY:
Monday 2 August 1954
The month before, on July 2, 1954, a Friday, Elvis, Dixie, and Elvis’s parents went to Ellis Auditorium along with an enormous crowd to the funeral of the two Blackwood brothers who were killed in a plane crash (in Alabama) on the 29th of June. Singing with the Blackwood Gospel Quartet had been one of Elvis’s early dreams.

Elvis’s star was on the ascent in 1954, but August had to bring back memories of the hard times in that same month back in 1942 when he was a child. His father Vernon had to move some 300 miles away to work in the southeastern corner of the state.

The J.A. Jones Construction Company’s Ozark Triangular Division Camp offered him a job at $44.05 for the week ending on the first of August, with an extra five bucks for five hours work the following week. Later that month he found a job in Aberdeen, Mississippi (south of Tupelo) at the Ferguson Oman Gulf Ordnance Plant.

He worked as a carpenter for one dollar an hour and earned overtime pay of $15 to $18 a week.

The Maple street house the family rented cost $8 a week. The family had some financial breathing room now.

AMELIA ISLAND, FLORIDA:
Thursday 2 August 2012
I am trying to build a website now that Elvis Fans in the 21st Century is being published on Amazon as an E book. So far I have managed to put my name and address. The rest is blank. The cover of my E book looks great, thanks to Steve Covey and Sherry Czerniejewski. I had no clue how to do any of that technical stuff. They are both scary smart.

I have permission from Wanda Sprung to use her snapshot of Elvis for the book. She took the picture when Elvis came to Tampa for the first time and she was thirteen. She took her Brownie Camera and snapped the picture of Elvis standing in a hotel doorway. I love it. He looks like he’s inviting us in.

TRIVIA ANSWER:
Tickle Me. Lonnie Beale