Vintage 1974-1978 Elvis Presley RCA Pocket Calendar Card Set 🎄 Five Years, Aloha Lei to Santa, Elvis and the Colonel

🎄 Why Was Elvis Still Wishing You Season's Greetings After He Died? Five Vintage RCA Pocket Calendar Cards, 1974 to 1978

Size: All five cards 4" x 2 1/4" ~ Little to slight wear.

Here's what these are, in plain words. A pocket calendar is a stiff little card made to ride around in your wallet, with a color picture of Elvis on one side and the whole year, month by month, on the other. His record company, RCA, printed a new one every year from 1963 through 1980 and sent them out to Elvis fan clubs and record stores, and the stores handed them to customers for free. It was a thank-you and a nudge to go buy the newest record.

You get five of them, one for each year from 1974 through 1978, drawn from my stock and just like the ones shown. I put these five together because laid side by side they tell a story no single card can. Three years of jumpsuits and a signature that reads "Sincerely" or "Thanks." Then 1977, the year that stopped the country. Then a card for the year after, with Santa Claus on it and two names still signed at the bottom: "Season's Greetings, Elvis and the Colonel." Those signatures are printed on, a copy of the handwriting and not signed by hand, and that last one is the one that gets me.

🌺 1974: The Flower Lei

Elvis is singing his heart out into the microphone in a white jumpsuit studded with red, blue and gold stones, with a big lei of pink and yellow flowers around his neck. Collectors know this one as the Aloha from Hawaii picture, and the concert behind that lei was a first. On January 14, 1973, at 12:30 in the morning Honolulu time so it would land in prime time across Asia and the Pacific, he took the stage at the Honolulu International Center and was beamed out live by satellite. Early reports said 1.5 billion people in 36 countries watched. Those numbers have been argued about ever since, but nobody argues it wasn't huge. Americans had to wait for NBC to air it on April 4. The show was a benefit for the Kui Lee Cancer Fund, named for the Hawaiian songwriter. Elvis made the first donation himself, $1,000, on the way to $75,000 raised. At the end of the night he threw his cape into the crowd, and a Honolulu Advertiser sportswriter named Bruce Spinks caught it.

🦚 1975: The Peacock

This is Elvis right in the middle of the jumpsuit years: white suit, a big gold beaded peacock running across the chest, mouth open mid-note, rings on the hand gripping the mic. Those stage suits were all Bill Belew's work, and fans gave every one a name after its stitching: the Aztec, the American Eagle he made for the Aloha special, the Mexican Sundial, and this one, the Peacock, which also turned up on the cover of the 1975 album Promised Land.

Flip over the 1974, 1975 and 1976 cards and you'll see the word CAMDEN. That was RCA's low-price line of records, started in 1953 and named for Camden, New Jersey, where RCA Victor had its plant and headquarters. The Camden Elvis albums became a fan favorite because they often slipped in songs that had never been on an album before. And the name runs deep. Camden is where the Victor Talking Machine Company set up in 1901, the outfit that built the Victrola record player and put Nipper the dog, listening to "His Master's Voice," in stained glass up in its factory tower. RCA bought Victor in 1929. In 1975 Pickwick picked up the rights to reissue the Camden records, so this card comes from the very year that label changed hands.

⭐ 1976: The Last Full Year

Elvis at the microphone in one of his famous white stage suits, gold stars all over the collar and sleeves, a lei and a red scarf around his neck. Printed in the corner: "Thanks, Elvis." It's the last full year he had. Twenty years earlier, on November 21, 1955, RCA Victor had bought the contract of a 20-year-old Memphis singer from Sam Phillips of Sun Records. Phillips asked $35,000, plus $5,000 to cover royalties Sun owed the kid. Colonel Tom Parker put the deal together, and the Memphis Press-Scimitar figured it was probably the most ever paid to get a country-western singer out of a contract. Every one of these cards is the payoff on that gamble.

🃏 1977: August 16 Is Just Another Tuesday

Elvis in profile at the mic, a black stage suit studded with gold, silver and red stones in looping flower patterns, a red scarf hanging from his neck. "Sincerely Elvis" in white script. Now turn it over. On the back of this card, August 16, 1977 is just another Tuesday.

Nobody who picked one up at a record store counter that year knew which squares would matter. Elvis turned 42 on Saturday, January 8. He gave his last concert on Sunday, June 26, at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis, sang for about 80 minutes to nearly 18,000 people, and closed with "Can't Help Falling in Love." His next tour was booked to open in Portland, Maine, on Wednesday, August 17. He died at Graceland the day before. The card holds every one of those dates, printed and waiting, with nothing marked on any of them.

Police estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people came to Graceland on August 17. About 80,000 lined the road the next day as the funeral went by. President Jimmy Carter said Elvis had "permanently changed the face of American popular culture." Record stores sold out, and Billboard reported RCA shipping 20 million records a week with as many as 40 pressing plants working overtime. A pocket calendar is made to last a single year. This one covers the year the whole country stopped to listen to him again.

One small thing to look for: the block letters RCA along the bottom. In 1968 RCA set aside Nipper the dog for those modern letters, the public missed him, and in October 1976 RCA announced he was coming back. This card still has the letters, a little time stamp from the changeover.

🎅 1978: "Elvis and the Colonel"

And here's the one that made me put this set together. Elvis on stage in a white jumpsuit with red trim, grinning, mic in hand, next to a big Christmas tree sprayed white like fresh snow and hung with blue bells. Santa Claus stands on the other side of the tree, and down front there's a doll in a pink party dress. Across the bottom corner: "Season's Greetings, Elvis and the Colonel."

This card is for the year after Elvis died, and it still carries both their names. The Colonel was Tom Parker, his manager. Parker signed just about everything as "Elvis and the Colonel," right down to the Christmas cards. Sending a holiday greeting to record company executives, radio DJs and promoters was a yearly habit; examples survive from 1958 on, including a 1961 mock-up shot on the set of Wild in the Country with the Colonel himself dressed as Santa. He wasn't a colonel at all, by the way. He was born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in Breda, in the Netherlands, in 1909, and the title was an honor from Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis in 1948 for work on Davis's campaign.

Parker sold Elvis the way a carnival man sells a show. In 1974 he set up a company called Boxcar Enterprises to rent out Elvis's picture for use on products, and he kept 50 percent of that income for himself. In September 1978, the same year as this card, he ran the "Always Elvis" fan convention at the Las Vegas Hilton, where he, Elvis's dad Vernon and Priscilla dedicated a bronze statue of Elvis. It was a busy year for Elvis things with the Colonel behind them.

💙 Those Blue Bells on the Tree

They fit him. Elvis' Christmas Album came out in 1957 with "Blue Christmas" on it, and it became the best-selling Christmas album in American history, past 20 million copies. RCA sent out a promotional record that same 1978 season, Season's Greetings from Elvis, made for DJs to play over the holidays. By the time this card went out, every Christmas greeting with his name on it was a memory.

👑 He Never Quite Left the Building

The most famous sign-off in show business started as crowd control. On December 15, 1956, in Shreveport, the announcer Horace "Hoss" Logan tried to stop a stampede for the exits by telling the audience Elvis had left the building. After August 1977 plenty of fans refused to believe he had left at all. The "Elvis lives" legend found its capital in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where in 1988 a woman from nearby Vicksburg said she had seen him at a supermarket, and her daughter said she spotted him eating at a Burger King. So maybe that's a Christmas card from a man who just wanted his quiet life back.

🖼️ Where They Go

Frame the photo sides in a row with Santa on the far right and bring it out every December, set them next to an Elvis Christmas record, or tuck one in your wallet the way the fans did. It's the King in his jumpsuit years, five years' worth of him, and my pictures don't fully capture the color and presence of the real cards. There is no new press run coming. When the last of these are hanging in collections and galleries, they will be very hard to track down for sale.