At 2340 on December 29th, 1944, Major Carol C. Smith crouched in the cramped cockpit of his P61 Black Widow at Meuire Field, Muro, watching his radar operator track a contact moving at 180 knots through the black skies north of the Philippine Islands. 26 years old, 43 combat missions, four confirmed kills. The Japanese…
Before the fame, before the screaming crowds, before the gold records and the legend, there was a boy, a truck driver from Memphis with a borrowed guitar and a trembling voice. His name was Elvis Presley. In the summer of 1954, he stepped onto a tiny stage at the Eagle’s Nest Club, not knowing that…
July 1st, 1944. Halandia Air Base, New Guinea. 4 P38. Lightning’s touchdown after 6 and 1/2 hours over enemy territory. Three pilots climb out with fuel gauges reading nearly empty. Maybe 50 gallons left in their tanks. The fourth aircraft flown by a 42-year-old civilian still shows 210 gall remaining. Same mission, same weather, same…
On July 5th, 1954, a 19-year-old truck driver walked into a small Memphis studio with no plan to change music forever. The session was going nowhere. The songs weren’t working. Frustrated and tired of trying, he stopped taking it seriously. During a break, he picked up an old blues song just to pass the time….
Los Angeles, 1973. Television specials in the early 1970s occupied a particular space in the entertainment landscape that no longer exists in quite the same way. an occasion, a genuine event, something that people arranged their evenings around because the medium was still young enough that certain combinations of performers on a single stage felt…
July 14th, 1960. Elvis Presley walked into a small neighborhood barber shop in downtown Memphis, wearing sunglasses and a hat, hoping for an hour of anonymity. What he heard in that chair from a barber who had no idea who he was cutting would stay with him for the rest of his life. And what…
Vincent Duca had been a paparazzi for 3 years and he was good at it. He knew how to blend into crowds, knew which celebrities frequented which restaurants, knew that scandal sold better than straight news. He’d made decent money photographing aldermen with mistresses, judges at strip clubs, society wives shopping in stores they couldn’t…
That’s very sweet, honey. But real performers spend years, decades, even perfecting their craft in professional environments. You don’t just wake up one day and become Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley sat at the Warn for Micah counter of Rosy’s Diner, sipping black coffee, listening to a young journalist from Nashville explain why he’d probably never…
Memphis, Tennessee, May 1957. Ellis Auditorium on South Main Street had been hosting events since 1924, which meant it had hosted enough of them to have developed its own particular atmosphere. The specific quality of a building that has absorbed decades of human occasion, celebration and mourning and music and argument, all of it accumulated…
S’s barber shop had been on Taylor Street since 1925. Salvatore Moretti opened it when he was 28 years old. Fresh from Italy. Didn’t speak much English, but he knew how to cut hair. For 44 years, Sal had been cutting the hair of Chicago’s most important men, mayors, aldermen, police chiefs, union bosses, and…
End of content
End of content