Latest Breaking News Online News Portal
Five years after Elvis Presley’s death, Graceland opened its doors to the public as a museum in 1982. When the house was handed over by the estate some items had been left exactly where they had been found. This included a samurai sword in a living room drawer, which had been gifted to The King by a Japanese war veteran. Yet sometimes even the archivists who maintain the Memphis mansion are surprised by what they discover.
Downstairs in Graceland’s basement fans can step into the TV room where The King would watch three screens at once, after hearing President Lyndon B Johnson did just that. A little further along the corridor is the pool room which has around 400 yards of patterned fabric on the walls and ceiling. This took three men 10 days to cut and hang.
Elvis had gotten the idea from a magazine with a picture of an 18th-century billiards room. The pool table itself has been there since 1960 and was one of the first items Elvis bought when he returned home from the army.
During a previous virtual live tour of Graceland, which Express.co.uk attended, Elvis expert and archivist Angie Marchese shared how The King’s favourite games to play here were eight-ball and rotation. The star’s daughter Lisa Marie has said how there was always a lot of mayhem going on in this room.
Angie said: “Oddly enough, this one I don’t understand, there’s shuffleboard wax, but there’s no shuffleboard.” Shuffleboard is another table game, but one in which players push pucks down a long, smooth wooden board into a scoring area at the opposite end. Perhaps Elvis had a shuffleboard table that was placed on the pool table at one time or maybe the wax was used for something else like the wooden sides?
The Graceland archivist pointed out: “Again, it’s just things we found in here that we just catalogued exactly where we found them and left them in place. [This] makes Graceland fun because it really does make it a home.”
