David Powell planned to drive with his headlights on yesterday. It's how he intended memorialize Elvis Presley, who died 31 years ago yesterday -- Aug. 16, 1977.
However, it's hardly the only way or the only day this 39-year-old Newton man remembers The King.
He and wife Helen couldn't forget about Elvis if they tried.
Near life-size cardboard stand-ups, posters and pictures of their idol show up in most of the rooms in the couple's mobile home. That includes, appropriately enough, the bathroom.
A spare bedroom is so crowded with Elvis dolls, lunchboxes, toy cars, shoes, flip books, board games and hundreds of other trinkets that one can barely turn around inside the room without sending items such as special-issue playing cards and a gold-plated Elvis medallion toppling to the small patch of floor left vacant by the collection.
The living room walls are crowded with Elvis album covers and beach blankets. Helen managed to squeeze in pictures of her parents and her graduation between two guitar-shaped, eagle-headed commemorative Elvis plates.
In the bedroom sit bottles of Blue Suede Chardonnay and Jailhouse Rock Red Merlot. It doesn't taste good, admits Helen, reclining on a throw pillow embroidered with the song lyric "It's Now or Never," but she and her husband would have bought it even if they had known that.
It complements the Vaughn-Bassett Elvis Presley bedroom suite, complete with dresser and armoire knobs stamped with the initials EP. David says that the quilted white-leather headboard is modeled after Elvis' bed.
Powell took the $4,000 for the bed, dresser and wardrobe out of his 401(k). It's his prize possession.
"I called up the funeral home and asked if they could bury me and the bed together," he said.
David started collecting Elvis stuff when he was 5. His aunt Sue Johnson -- who Powell calls Elvis' second biggest fan -- gave him an 8-by-10 picture of Presley's famous face printed on a mirror she won at the Hickory American Legion Fair. He wasn't sure where it was, before realizing that it was hanging in the spare bedroom. Sometimes, with a collection that spreads across the entire house, it's hard to keep up with everything, Powell said.
As he gives the grand tour, David, a jolly fellow with a grin he can't get rid of, is as full of Elvis trivia as his house is of Elvis knick-knacks.
There are more cameras at Graceland than at the White House, Powell said.
The last two songs the King ever played were "Unchained Melody" and "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain," he said.
Powell would rather talk trivia than emotions. He and his wife don't have much to say about why they remain Elvis fans.
"He's just once in a lifetime," David said, shrugging like he can't believe it's not evident why anyone would want to devote entire rooms to Presley.
"I mean, that voice?"
It's the voice coming out of his television, where the movie King Creole was playing, and the voice he listens for when he's up until 3 a.m. searching YouTube for Elvis video clips he's never seen before.
"I just want people to know Elvis is not forgotten in Catawba County," he said.
■ Ragan Robininson is an editor with the Hickory Daily Record.
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