Every year at Graceland, on holidays and especially around Christmas and New Year, the King of Rock and Roll organized something that would give a modern safety inspector a heart attack.
He bought thousands of dollars’ worth of fireworks, split his friends into two teams, sent them out into the field behind the house, and had them fire rockets at each other in the dark. He called the game War. The rules were simple. The winning team was the one that came away with the fewest burns.
This was not a small purchase. Elvis would clear out the fireworks stands — rockets, buzz bombs, Roman candles by the crate. One shop clerk, looking at the pile the King had just bought, is said to have asked him: “What’re you going to do? Start World War II all over again?”
Then it began, and it was properly dangerous. Over the years, the players got smarter and started dressing for battle. Elvis’s stepbrother David Stanley remembered the kit: flight suits, racing helmets, goggles, and rags tied across their faces to cover any exposed skin. Grown men in crash helmets, in a Memphis field, at night, shooting explosives at their employer.
And Elvis was the worst of all of them. According to Stanley, “Elvis loved fireworks. Elvis would get a 12-pack of Roman candles and touch the whole thing off at once. He would become absolutely maniacal, running around… shooting fireworks at anyone in sight.”
Elvis Nearly Blew His Dad’s Head Off in a ‘Fireworks War’
Getting hit was not a small thing. His cousin Billy Smith described the sensation with wonderful understatement: when one of the fireballs or rockets caught you, it gave you a pretty good lift and stung like crazy — but, he added, they were having so much fun that nobody seemed to mind. The battles could run as late as four in the morning.
There were injuries, inevitably. One year, one of Elvis’s employees, Richard Davis, took a buzz bomb straight to the face and it melted his goggles around his eyes. He was, remarkably, fine. Elvis himself picked up burns over the years too.
One of the most famous of these battles happened at Christmas 1957, and the timing is what makes it unforgettable. Elvis had just received his draft notice. He was in such good spirits about it that he let local reporters into Graceland to photograph him with the notice sitting under his Christmas tree. Then, the moment the press had gone home, out came the fireworks and the whole thing kicked off in the field behind the house.
It fits everything else about the way he lived. This is the same man who rented entire amusement parks at midnight so he could ride the roller coaster with no crowds, who booked out whole cinemas for private screenings, and who once flew to Denver in the middle of the night for a sandwich. He was the most famous man on the planet and couldn’t walk into a shop, so he built his own private world at Graceland and filled it with the things a boy from Tupelo would have wanted.
And what that boy wanted, apparently, was a fireworks war with his mates — in a field, in the dark, wearing a crash helmet.