Elvis Remembered: A Number Shared By Frank Murtaugh, Memphis Magazine It was a short, significant drive after the longest trip home of my life. After a year in Turin, Italy (where my parents had done research for their dissertations), my family had flown home to the States. Following a week on the Carolina coast and another in east Tennessee, we found ourselves at my grandmother’s home in Memphis. August here can be sweltering, but I have no memory of the heat on August 16, 1977. Thirty-four years later, though, I remember a short drive Dad and I made to a convenience store near my grandmother’s house in Central Gardens. (If not baseball cards, my prize was likely a slurpee of some kind.) When we pulled back into my grandmother’s driveway, Dad turned off the engine and told me something that shook my 8-year-old world: Elvis Presley was in the hospital. Dad had apparently heard a report on the radio. Unless it was “Hound Dog” or “Jailhouse Rock” playing, the radio distraction for a ...
