Been sittin’ here thinkin’ of my ol’ buddy Elvis… Yeah, I know, sounds like I’m name-droppin’ again. Okay, so we were not real close buddies, but Elvis and I had become friends during the production of a movie he was making at the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962.
I was in charge of the popular NASA Exhibit and Elvis was making “It Happened at the World’s Fair,” about a crop duster pilot who wanted to become an astronaut. They were filming on the Seattle World’s Fairgrounds, close to the now-famous Space Needle, the structure that identifies the city of Seattle just as the Pagoda atop Mount Penn identifies Reading, PA.
Elvis was fascinated with the space program so I gave him a tour of the exhibit and let him try on our space suit (didn’t fit). Turns out Elvis needed a dressing room so I volunteered my office at the NASA exhibit, one of the film’s locations. Elvis accepted my offer, much to the delight of my volunteer exhibit guides, twenty attractive young college girls. No sooner did Elvis arrive when the guides were reduced to a giggling gaggle of giddy girls.
From that moment on my office became the biggest attraction at the World’s Fair. It fairly bulged with Elvis’ noisy entourage of big-haired teenage boys from Memphis, all of whom set their hormonal sights on my platoon of lovely girl guides. But Elvis himself was always a perfect gentleman – called me sir.
The then-unknown child actor Kurt Russell dropped by often… he was a little kid who played a precocious brat who kicked Elvis in the shins. It was his big scene. Of course, Kurt went on to a hugely successful movie career of his own.
Co-stars Gary Lockwood and Joan O’Brien would also drop by. Ted Richmond, the producer, would regale me with Hollywood yarns over drinks. Ted told me how the famous leading man Errol Flynn had died in his arms of a heart attack three years earlier while on location in Spain. Well, I learned later that nothing from Hollywood is real. Yeah, Flynn died of a heart attack three years earlier, but in Canada, not Spain. Well, what the heck! It was fun just to sit around, drink and swap lies with those Hollywood guys.
When Elvis left he signed his copy of the working script as a thank-you gift. I gave it to one of my kids who promptly lost it – we found it years later discarded in a pile of newspapers. I sent it off to Sotheby’s famous auction house in London… got $1,000 for it.
What brought all this back from more than half a century ago, you ask? Well, Elvis died about four decades ago August ‘2017, and Cable TV had been running that old movie fairly nearly every week: “It Happened at the World’s Fair.”
-August 2018-