The Elvis Photo
So I thought it would be appropriate to explain the story behind the header of this blog. Surely you are questioning my motives behind designing this blog based on what Casey, our sports editor, called “A drunk, 80-year-old Elvis impersonator.”
Truth is, this photo is actually of a drunk, 64-year-old Elvis impersonator.
March 4, I sat at my cubicle in The Jessamine Journal newsroom. At about 9 a.m., One of the other writers, Bob, came to me saying that the fire chief had called saying to get down to the courthouse. His exact words were “Elvis showed up to court, and he’s drunk.”
I had been on the job for just two months, so I wasn’t quite sure who this Elvis fellow could be. Does Nicholasville have an Elvis who routinely surfaces around town wreaking havoc? If you follow Jessamine County news on any sort of regular basis, you know that this is not out of the question. At any rate, when you hear somebody say “Elvis showed up to court, and he’s drunk,” you had better not ask questions — you should just get up and go.
I grabbed a camera and hopped into Bob’s Buick. We drove to the courthouse, not completely sure what we were looking for. Bob dropped me off to go park, and I began looking around for whatever it was I was we were supposed to find. When Bob got back, we went down to the court annex on Main Street where we found the chief waiting for us with a smirk on his face. He told us that a man named David Blaisdell showed up for his 8:30 court date dressed head to toe like The King. The judge, so taken back by what had stumbled into his courtroom, sentenced the man for contempt of court and sentenced him to three days in jail. The deputy who was charged with transporting Blaisdell is also a volunteer firefighter, so he called the chief with the good news.
So we waited on Main Street for this deputy to bring Elvis out to his squad car. Finally, the door swung open and they emerged.
At this point, I must admit that I was not terribly optimistic about how entertaining this hound dog would be. I have seen impersonators that have no business sullying the reputations of their namesakes. Blaisdell, however, did not disappoint.
He wore a black rhinestone-studded suit with black dress shoes. His hair was jet-black and slicked back on his head. He had an enormous white belt, gold chains and a gold scarf around his neck. His cherry-red -framed sunglasses had studs down the sides. He spoke with a deep Tennessee drawl. As he walked by us, he said “Thank you, thank you very much,” over and over. This man was The King.
As I snapped away, I was in awe of the rarity and overall peculiarity of the situation. I was nowhere near the first person to witness Elvis, real or fake, in trouble with the law, but I was surely one of the first to document it.
When we got back to the office, Shane, our designer, put the picture up immediately onto the Web site. That evening, the local CBS affiliate picked up the photo and ran it on the 6 o’clock news. From there, it skyrocketed.
By the next day, CBS affiliates around the country had picked it up. We saw the story as far away as Seattle, Tuscon, Billings, Huntsville and Wyoming. It was also on Yahoo! News and Google. America had taken an interest in Elvis. That Thursday, my editor got a phone call from TruTV, formerly CourtTV. They wanted to use the photo on their upcoming “World’s Dumbest Criminals” show. We obliged.
In just two days, a phone call from the fire chief turned into maybe the hottest news story ever to come out of Nicholasville, Ky. And that makes it worthy of being the header for this blog.
