There’s no explaining it. I’m not a crazy-for-Elvis fanatic. Even so, each January while sensible people clear away clutter and embrace fitness, I find a way to commemorate Elvis Presley’s birthday.
Born Jan. 8, 1935, Presley would have been 74 this week. I’d like to spend Thursday snuggled up at home watching Elvis movies — “Viva Las Vegas” and the King’s 1968 NBC concert, the so-called “comeback special,” with Elvis in black leather. No time for that.
Good thing there’s never a shortage of Elvis stories that others are eager to share.
Mike Cockrum of Marysville contacted me with his esoteric tale of Elvisania last April. That’s when I wrote about a photograph of Presley with my late father-in-law, who’d been a radio newsman in Dallas. When Cockrum saw that picture, he sent news of his own Elvis artifact.
It’s a 1948 Ford tractor, model N9. The sturdy piece of farm machinery once belonged to Cockrum’s grandparents, Homer and Georgia Cockrum. When 53-year-old Mike Cockrum was a little boy, his grandparents had a cattle ranch in California’s San Fernando Valley.
“Loving You,” Presley’s second movie, was filmed at the Cockrum ranch in 1957. If you happen to spend Elvis’s birthday watching it, you’ll catch a glimpse of the tractor. It’s in several scenes of “Loving You,” which has a plot mirroring Presley’s rise from small-town singer to rock ‘n’ roll star.
“My grandparents not only met Elvis, but both of his parents,” said Cockrum, who now owns the tractor with a friend. “They liked Elvis very much. He was very polite. They had nothing but good things to say,” he said.
The Marysville man said Vernon and Gladys Presley visited the set during the filming of “Loving You,” and that Elvis’s parents appear in a concert scene near the end of the movie. Cockrum also said that although Paramount Pictures told his grandparents “they would leave the ranch as they found it,” the place was a mess after filming. “They vowed never to do it again,” he said.
The Southern California ranch his grandparents owned for 23 years is now a gated community called Bell Canyon. After his grandfather’s death in 1979, his grandmother sold the tractor to a caretaker. The caretaker’s daughter later owned it.
On a trip to California a few years back, Cockrum happened to contact the caretaker and expressed interest in buying the tractor. Of all the ranch equipment, he remembered it best. It still has “Cockrum Company” painted on it.
Close friends of Cockrum’s, Mike and Markey Essinger, moved several years ago from Everett to a farm near Pocatello, Idaho. “I sent them a bunch of pictures of the ranch when I was a little kid,” Cockrum said. “One picture had my mother, sister and grandfather in the barnyard — and there was the tractor. My grandfather put his heart and soul into that tractor.”
Mike Essinger agreed not only to buy half of the tractor with Cockrum, but to help move it from California and keep it in Idaho. Cockrum didn’t disclose what they paid, but said tractors that age and model range in value from $2,300 to $5,600.
In September, the two friends and Markey Essinger’s brother-in-law traveled from Idaho to California’s Santa Barbara area and back, hauling the tractor on a trailer. It’s now at the Idaho farm. Cockrum admitted to wondering more than once what he’d do with it. “I live in a suburb, I can’t even drive it on the street,” he said.
Cockrum said he told his friend, “you do all the maintenance, and I can go back and play with it. He made me a key.” Essinger, he said, may publicize its Elvis connection at tractor shows. It’s a piece of Elvis history, but also a piece of Cockrum’s past.
In Monroe, another man has direct memories of the King.
“I was a teenage top-40 deejay, first at WHHM and then with WHBQ in Memphis back in the early ’60s,” said Bob Clark, who is 65. “My best friend then and now is George Klein, who went to high school with ‘L’ and was one of his best friends.”
Clark worked on the radio in Memphis from 1962 to 1964. “The first time I met Elvis, he had rented the Memphis Mid-South Fairgrounds for a party from midnight to 6 a.m.,” Clark said. “He was just a nice guy, talented and nice to everybody — the perfect Southern gentleman.”
Clark, whose Memphis disc jockey colleagues included Wink Martindale and Jack Parnell, said Presley would call the radio station requesting songs.
“He called me up one night at WHHM. I think he requested ‘Marie’s the Name,’ it was his song,” Clark said. “I didn’t believe it — this is Elvis. He got six words into it, I recognized the voice.”
The voice. The movies. The myth. It all lives on — and on.
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
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