Hound Dog Days in Memphis

A city survives labor turmoil and Presley mourners

Memphis, summer 1978. A steamy day in the pleasant but tired Southern town, nestled in a bend of the Mississippi, that gave America the blues, W.C. Handy and Beale Street, Holiday Inns and Piggly Wiggly supermarkets. And Elvis Presley.

It is a year since Elvis' death, and mourners are making the pilgrimage to Memphis and the grave of the rock king at his mansion known as Graceland. But the streets are eerily quiet as the evening advances. Only the buzzing of summer locusts in the crape myrtle trees breaks the silence. The police have been on strike for six days, and Mayor Wyeth Chandler, declaring a "state of civil emergency," has imposed a dusk to dawn curfew.

The mood has been bizarre all week long as the Presley fans arrive in a city that seems to be coming apart. Trash is lying in the streets because sanitation workers stay off for a day, honoring police picket lines. Most of the firemen are also out on strike, and both they and the police are ignoring court orders to return to work. The schools are scheduled to open later in the week, but the teachers say they will not cross any picket lines. The mayor has called out the National Guard, costing the city $70,000 a day. Armed with M-16 rifles, bayonets fixed, soldiers are patrolling the city --or pitching horseshoes down at the armory to kill time.

In such a setting it does not seem strange that the street lights should suddenly go out at 12:33 a.m. on Wednesday, the anniversary day, or that air-conditioning units straining against the muggy night air should go silent. Richard David Hyder, 29, a private security guard paid to protect an electricity substation, has come to work at midnight after taking a few drinks. For reasons of his own he has flipped a bank of switches. For three hours, until power is restored, there is scattered looting of liquor stores, as sheriffs deputies, National Guardsmen and nonstriking city police supervisors try to keep order. At a darkened local hospital, a child is delivered by flashlight.

The strikes and the curfew have persuaded some Elvis fans to stay home, but the hotels are still nearly 80% full (they had been booked solid for weeks in advance), and about 100,000 admirers have come to Memphis from the nearby dirt farms and even from as far away as Japan.

On Wednesday morning, a Gray Line tour bus pulls out of a Holiday Inn and the guide, 21-year-old Diane Piecara, boasts of the anniverary: "You are making history today." Her bus includes half a dozen Canadians and a few Norwegians, infants, and grandmothers. But mostly there are middleaged, middle-American women, wearing shorts or double-knit slacks. Their hair is bouffant or stiffly curled. Diane points out the Loews Palace cinema "where Elvis was fired from his first job for fighting another usher over the girl who sold popcorn." There are "ooohs" and "aaahs" mixed with the click-flash-buzz of Polaroids and Instamatics. The bus makes twelve more stops in the hour and a half before reaching Graceland, and all of them have a poignant meaning for the fans. They see the boarded-up men's shop on Beale Street where Elvis bought his first sequined suit. They see Nathan Novick's pawnshop, where he got his first guitar at the age of eleven. They stop at St. Joseph Hospital, where his mother worked as a nurse's aide, and the public housing apartment on Exchange Street where the family lived. When they stop at Humes High School, Diane says: "Can't you just imagine a 16-year-old Elvis walking through the doors every day in a pink shirt with those blue eyes?" They can indeed. And they stop at Baptist Memorial Hospital, where Presley was pronounced dead.

Along the way, Diane quizzes the group on Elvis trivia: "What was the third television show he appeared on?" Everyone seems to know: "The Ed Sullivan Show!" Diane asks another: "What was the song Elvis sang at a state fair in Tupelo in 1946 to win second prize?" Nancy Jones, 13, who has come all the way from Tulsa with her grandmother, knows right off. Old Shep, she says.

Elvis Presley Boulevard, a wide strip of used car lots, fast food restaurants and gas stations, leads to Graceland. By noon the rising temperature is well into the 90s and ambulances are carrying away those who have succumbed to the heat while crowding in front of the ornate plantation-style house. A brick wall on the grounds has turned into a "Wall of Love," covered with scrawled messages from admirers. Some of the fans have patiently endured the three-hour wait every day for a week so they can again and again walk up the shaded driveway, past rows of huge flower arrangements sent from all over the world, to the bronze plaque marking Presley's grave. They pass by at a rate of about 1,200 an hour. "Just being close makes me feel good," says Fay Matheny, 34, a factory worker from Richmond, Va. Karen Christ, 30, of Canton, Ohio, calls the ground "impressive, hallowed," and laments that people "have pulled off bark and written on tree trunks with red pens." Among the many flowers is a pink teddy bear pinned with a note reading: "My love for Elvis lives on."

There are a few wet eyes, but no hysteria, in the crowd that is almost entirely white and middle class. The people are quiet and reverent. "He's a legend and we just want to be part of it," explains George Lecky, 31, a truck driver who has come from Belfast, Northern Ireland, to spend more than a week in Memphis. He has brought with him his girl friend, his daughter and a nephew; all four wear matching Elvis T shirts.

Fans stop at the grave, look, maybe drop a carnation, and snap a picture. "Keep moving along please," exhort the sheriffs deputies who have replaced the striking city police at the grave site. Outside, the hustlers and hucksters sell everything from posters to a $160 Elvis doll that plays Love Me Tender while dispensing bourbon.

Across town, at city hall, where the smell of freshly cut grass mingles with the summer heat, Mayor Chandler is negotiating with the striking police. He proposes a public referendum to decide whether sales taxes should be raised to pay for what he says is the difference between the city's 6% pay offer and the union demand for 7%. The union is strongly against having its contract singled out for a public vote.

On Thursday a modicum of normality returns. The police have reduced their picketing and the sanitation workers are again collecting trash. There are no pickets in front of the schools and the teachers begin their first lessons of the semester. In front of city hall, union leaders urge strikers to stay calm. Says Memphis Police Association President David Baker: "The one thing that marked the situation in this city is that this has been a peaceful demonstration of what we believe in." Despite the arrest of 66 strikers earlier in the week for disobeying the curfew, there has been no outbreak of violence.

Finally, early Friday morning, tentative settlement is reached. There will be a two-year agreement with most of the monetary benefits sought by the unions. The workers, relieved, vote to ratify. A long hot week in this town of 665,000 appears to be cooling off, and the tens of thousands who have come to mourn Elvis Presley, dead a year, are starting to go home.

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