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Elvis had a twin
On January 8, 1935, Elvis Aron (later named Aaron) Presley was born in his parents’ two-bedroom home in East Tupelo, Mississippi, about 35 minutes after he his identical twin brother, Jesse Garon, who was stillborn. The next day, Jesse was buried in an unmarked grave in the nearby Priceville Cemetery.
Elvis, who spoke of his twin throughout his life, grew up as an only child in a poor family. His father, Vernon, worked a series of odd jobs, and in 1938 he was sentenced to three years in prison for forging a $4 check (he spent less than a year behind bars). In 1948, the Presleys moved from Tupelo to Memphis in search of better opportunities.
After graduation, he worked in an auto shop and drove a truck before launching his music career with the July 1954 recording of “That’s All Right.”
Elvis never performed outside of North America.
It is estimated that 40% of Elvis music sales have been made outside of the United States; however, with the exception of a handful of concerts he gave in Canada in 1957, never performed on foreign soil.
Multiple sources have suggested that Elvis’s manager, Colonel Parker, turned down lucrative offers for the singer to perform abroad because Parker was an undocumented immigrant and feared he might not be allowed to return to the United States if he traveled abroad.
Elvis bought FDR’s presidential yacht
In 1964, Elvis paid $55,000 for the Potomac, the 165-foot-long ship that served as the “Floating White House” of Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1936 to 1945.
Built in 1934, the Potomac was originally a US Coast Guard ship. After the president’s death in 1945, the ship was decommissioned and went through a series of owners before Elvis purchased it.
However soon donated it to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, which in turn sold the ship to raise money.
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