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Heading home on an eastbound, slow-moving city bus on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, in the late afternoon of Tuesday, August 16, 1977, David C. Fischer, age twenty-eight, gripped an overhead bar with his one free hand and became aware of a conversation between two women, probably a bit younger than he, who also were attempting to keep their balance in the crowded aisle of the lurching vehicle. “Secretarial types,” is how Fischer might have, at the time, characterized the women.
“...so I looked up the number of the L.A. Times,” one of the women said, “and I called, and it rang and rang, and when someone answered I said, ‘Can I ask you something?’ And that’s all I said and she said, ‘Yes, it is true: Elvis Presley died today.’”
Fischer, in his Fjord, Wisconsin, home on Thursday, August 16, 2018, opened his New York Times app on his smartphone for about the dozenth time of the day, or hundredth time it may have been, and was nearly as startled and stunned at the discovery of a musical performer’s death as he had been in that other memorable moment on the Los Angeles city bus.
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