We thought it would be a great way of honoring her Jewish heritage as well as honoring her,” said Marchese, who has worked at Graceland for 32 years and is one of the world’s preeminent experts on the Presley family. “We think it’s what Elvis would have wanted.” After one of my performances," Hartal recalls, "one of the residents said to me, ‘You aren't Elvis, you're Schmelvis.'" And "Schmelvis" was born. In May 1929, Parker returned to the U.S. and found work with carnivals owing to his experience in the Netherlands. [4] He enlisted in the United States Army a few months later, taking the name Tom Parker from the name of the officer who interviewed him to disguise the fact that he was an illegal alien. He completed basic training at Fort McPherson in Georgia. [4]

As the war against Hamas unfolds, our unwavering newsroom remains committed to covering Israel's most profound crisis. Present-day photograph of a whitewashed house, about 15 feet wide. Four banistered steps in the foreground lead up to a roofed porch that holds a swing wide enough for two. The front of the house has a door and a single-paned window. The visible side of the house, about 30 feet long, has double-paned windows. Tablet magazine has a charming podcast (originally broadcast on Santa Monica public radio station KCRW-FM, they note) of Memphis native Harold Fruchter, son of the late Rabbi Alfred Fruchter, reminiscing about his family’s relationship with Elvis Presley. Elvis lived downstairs from the Fruchters as a teenager, befriended them and occasionally served as their Shabbos goy. Elvis’s and Harold’s mothers were friendly and Mrs. Fruchter sometimes helped the impoverished Presleys with the grocery bills. Fruchter says he once heard that Elvis had made a donation to a Jewish organization to honor the Fruchters, and he found that most gratifying. Parker worked as a "consultant" for Hilton Hotels for a number of years after Presley's death, [64] with some believing he was working to pay off debts owed to the casino from his gambling during Presley's performances there. [64] Part of this role resulted in Parker keeping the same fourth-floor suite he occupied when Presley was alive. By 1984, with his gambling debts reportedly rising again, he was evicted. [64] On the surface, however, relations between the two were as good as ever, with Parker helping the Hilton to organize another fan convention event in August 1987 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Presley's death. [64] Parker was born as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in Breda, North Brabant, Netherlands, [4] the seventh of eleven children, [6] to Maria Elisabeth (Marie) Ponsie and Adam van Kuijk. [7] His father was employed in the military for twelve years and by the time Parker had been born, he worked as a liveryman. [8] Parker had French heritage through his great-great-grandfather Petri Ponci who arrived from Val-d'Oise to the Netherlands in the late eighteenth century. [9] As a boy, he worked as a barker at carnivals in his hometown, learning many of the skills he would later use working in the entertainment industry. [1] [4]Because some Jewish traditions consider the heritage to be passed down along the maternal line, Presley's purported Jewish lineage is arguably a matter of religious interpretation. The question of what counts as Jewish identity has been hotly debated before. The man certainly did not identify himself as Jewish based on publicly available knowledge.

In 1963, Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s audacious manager who had gotten his start selling candy apples in carnivals, read in the paper that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidential yacht, the U.S.S. Potomac, was going to be salvaged. Some called it his “Floating White House.” But Parker, who was born in Holland in 1909 as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk and never became an American citizen, didn’t care about that. He saw the Potomac as just another snow job, as he called his art of the con. He would donate the rusting hulk to charity and put a P.R. feather in the cap of his only client: Elvis Presley.

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Presley had been showing signs of rebellion against Parker, and Parker believed that a stint in the Army would cure him of this. [36] The article contains a lot of pictures, but none of them show Presley in his later years (after 1972). We are told that he gained a lot of weight and his health dramatically deteriorated after 1973 and especially by early 1977, but we are not shown his appearance. The commons category "Category:Elvis Presley by year" ends in 1973. I'm sure there must be a lot of pictures of him from 1975–1977 somewhere – he was a very famous, frequently photographed person and he continued to appear in public. It would be nice to have such a picture in the article. —⁠ ⁠ BarrelProof ( talk) 21:45, 3 June 2023 (UTC) But her husband was far from convinced. “Dad was so upset by that,” Harold Fruchter remembered. “He said, ‘How could you think that Elvis’s music was anything like great cantorial music?’”