It was almost midnight at Graceland on February 1, 1976. Elvis Presley was sitting with two friends, swapping stories, when the conversation drifted to a sandwich one of them had eaten in Denver. Elvis remembered it. He’d had one himself, and he had never gotten over it. Right there, in the middle of the night, he announced he wanted one. There was just one problem. The sandwich was almost 1,000 miles away.
What Elvis did next is the reason people are still telling this story fifty years later.
First, you need to understand the sandwich. It was called the Fool’s Gold Loaf and served at a Denver restaurant called the Colorado Mine Company. It wasn’t a normal sandwich. It was an entire loaf of bread, hollowed out and stuffed with a full jar of peanut butter, a full jar of blueberry jam, and a whole pound of bacon.
One sandwich came out to roughly 8,000 calories. And it cost $49.95 — an outrageous price in 1976. That’s exactly why they named it Fool’s Gold.
Elvis Presley’s Midnight Jet Ride — All for a Sandwich
So why were two men from Denver sitting in Elvis’s living room? Because Elvis loved police officers. He collected their badges, sent them gifts, and treated them like family — and Denver had even made him an honorary member of their police force. That night his guests were Captain Jerry Kennedy of the Denver Police Department and Ron Pietrafeso, who worked for Colorado’s Strike Force Against Crime. They’d been reminiscing about their favorite restaurant back home. Then somebody mentioned the sandwich.
Most people would have shrugged and gone to bed. Elvis got everyone in a car. They drove to the Memphis airport, climbed aboard his private jet — a Convair 880 he’d named the Lisa Marie, after his daughter — and took off into the dark. The flight took two hours. They touched down at Denver’s Stapleton International Airport at 1:40 in the morning, and the plane rolled straight into a private hangar instead of the terminal.
Someone was waiting for them. Buck Scott, who owned the Colorado Mine Company, had come out in the middle of the night with his wife Cindy — carrying 22 fresh Fool’s Gold Loaves. They’d also brought their young cook, Nick Andurlakis, who was only about sixteen years old and had made the sandwiches himself.
What happened next is the best part: everyone sat down right there in the airport hangar and ate. For two solid hours, they worked through the sandwiches, washing them down with champagne and Perrier. Elvis even called his two pilots over to join in.
Then, when the food was gone, they got back on the plane and flew home to Memphis. They never left the airport. They never saw a single street in Denver. Roughly 2,000 miles, round trip, in the dead of night, for a sandwich — and Elvis got exactly what he wanted. As for the teenage cook standing in that hangar at two in the morning, watching the King of Rock and Roll eat his cooking? He got a story to tell for the rest of his life.