Today in 1964, Elvis Presley donated a historic Navy ship to St. Jude’s Hospital in Memphis to help the facility raise money.
Which on its face sounds like a lovely thing to do, though there’s a lot of backstory here and it gets wild.
Let’s start with the ship, which was built in 1934 for the US Coast Guard; back then it was a cutter named Electra.
Two years later, Electra became the USS Potomac, a Navy ship that happened to be a favorite hangout for then-President (and former Assistant Secretary of the Navy) Franklin Roosevelt.
The Potomac earned the nickname “the Floating White House,” because Roosevelt spent so much time there; he gave at least one of his radio “fireside chats” from the ship, and he hosted a number of European dignitaries aboard.
The Potomac kept working after FDR passed away in 1945, but it wasn’t the Floating White House after that; the National Park Service describes this part of the ship’s story as “a long and ignominious decline from its former role in world affairs.”
By 1964, it was up for sale, and it likely would have been sold for scrap had it not been for Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker.
The notorious schemer figured he could get Elvis some good publicity if the King bought the boat and then gave it to charity.
He arranged for Presley to buy the Potomac for $55,000; they announced it would go to the March of Dimes – fitting, since FDR had founded it.
But they didn’t want to try to maintain or even resell the Potomac; the Coast Guard also said no when Parker offered it to them.
Just as Elvis started getting NEGATIVE publicity for this apparent misadventure, he and Parker found a taker: actor Danny Thomas, who accepted it for his St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis.
The hospital was able to resell the ship, which did some good for its mission, but Vanity Fair wrote https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/06/colonel-tom-parker-elvis-true-story that for the press conference announcing the deal, Parker only had one side of the ship repainted.
The Potomac’s next few chapters got even weirder: once it was seized during a drug operation and at another point it sank, before it was raised and eventually refurbished.
Today you can visit and even take a cruise on the ship once used by a president and bought by a king.
Here’s the story of another not-so-successful enterprise: today in 2018, authorities found a man inside Brisbane, Australia’s Masonic Memorial Centre.
Specifically, he was inside the building’s pipe organ, wearing no clothes and, according to a news report, “surrounded by the remnants of a cheeseburger.”
The man apologized, saying “things just got a little bit loose.”
Former Brisbane Freemason Glenn Langford apologises after being found naked in broken pipe organ, surrounded by cheeseburgers (The West Australian)
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