Here’s a tip for those in the ruthless world of Elvis Presley impersonators: McHenry County lounges could be gold mines.
Or so says a Texas firm that has taken market research to a seemingly goofy new extreme, assigning a label to each county in the nation based on its affinity for Elvis.
Residents of mostly rural McHenry County are listed as “Elvis Lovers,” the highest level of devotion possible in the survey. Conducted by an outfit called Direct Image Concepts of Bellaire, Texas, the survey suggests that at least 46 percent of McHenry County households are still crazy about the swivel-hip singing legend.
“We play about five Elvis songs a day, and that’s a conservative estimate,” said Paul Eberhardt, a disk jockey at WMCW-AM in Harvard. “You could say Elvis is alive and kicking in McHenry County.”
In the ever-churning land of Elvis scholarship, there are doubters, to be sure. One academic questioned the methods used to pinpoint Elvis lovers, and residents in counties labeled “Elvis Loathers” couldn’t name anyone who hates “The King.”
Nonetheless, the survey provides a savory snack for the American appetite for Elvis trivia.
It found that McHenry County’s enthusiasm for Elvis stands out in the Chicago area, a region that is not fertile territory for mania about the deceased idol, who would have been 59 this Saturday.
Elsewhere in the six-county metropolitan area, people in Lake, Kane and Will Counties are listed as probable “Elvis Likers.” Those in Cook County are likely “Elvis Dislikers.” And then there are indifferent Du Page County residents, who fall under the category “Elvis Who?”
John Geib has concocted something of a shrine to Elvis in his Highland Park home and performs in Lake County as “John-E-Elvis.” Though he might surely be a bit of an oddity in his suburb, he claims he surveys many kindred spirits from the stage. “There’s an awful lot of people up here who are Elvis lovers,” he said. “I’ve seen them. They respond tremendously well.”
The curious analysis of Elvis’ legacy should come as no surprise, given that American consumers are routinely grilled-at entrances to shopping malls, in dinner-time phone calls and on junk-mail questionnaires-about everything from toothpaste preferences to favorite sexual fantasies.
Bob Lunn, president of Direct Image Concepts Inc., said he launched the Elvis survey after a client asked for ways to pinpoint markets more likely to buy Elvis memorabilia.
The client went bankrupt, but Lunn has generated a windfall of publicity by making the survey available to the media.
Lunn said he started the survey after he obtained the list of 250 Elvis fan clubs and sent questionnaires to members. He used the 7,000 responses to develop a composite of the typical Elvis fan: a conservative, blue-collar, white woman in her 40s or 50s who votes Republican, has a high school education or less, and is married with children.
The typical fan, Lunn said, drives American sedans or pickup trucks, swims in above-ground pools, smokes menthol cigarettes, drinks malt liquor, and eats white bread, canned meats and Velveeta.
She watches sitcoms and the Home Shopping Network and reads Bride’s Magazine and the National Enquirer.
Lunn said he then took that profile of the stereotypical fan and compared it with county-by-county demographic and marketing data.
John Bakke, a communications professor at Memphis State University who has taught classes on Elvis’ impact on popular culture, said Lunn’s findings were flawed because the typical Elvis fan doesn’t belong to a Elvis fan club. Fan club members, Bakke said, are far more fanatical about Elvis than an average fan.
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“I wouldn’t accept that as factual at all,” Bakke said. “My experience has been that you can’t spot (Elvis fans) because they are so different,” Bakke said. “They come in all shapes and sizes.”
Regardless of the survey’s accuracy, residents of chic Chicago neighborhoods and the upscale suburbs, it goes without saying, came nowhere near fitting the Elvis Lover profile.
“Our clientele, for the most part, could care less who Elvis was,” sniffed Geoff Albores, a 21-year-old clerk at the Wax Trax Records on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago’s trendy Lincoln Park neighborhood. Albores said he changes the station “right away” when Elvis comes on the radio.
“That was the ’50s. There’s all this hype about him. He’s been elevated to some kind of saint,” Albores said. “I just think he was not all that. He’s just another stub in the chain of music.”
The Chicago area’s apparent negative attitude towards Elvis is no surprise to James Farrah, a city-based Elvis impersonator who recalled Downstate women screaming for his sweat-drenched scarves.
“When you say, `You ain’t nothing but a hound dog’ to a businessman who grew up in Wilmette, he’ll say, `What’s a hound dog?’
“But somebody from a rural area got a hound dog,” Farrah said. “That’s Elvis turf.”
If the survey’s extrapolations are correct, Elvis’ most devout fans reside in Greenville, S.C. The King’s hometown, Tupelo, Miss., is fourth on the list.
Sarasota, Fla., and Reno should be hotbeds of Elvis Loathing, according to the survey. Lunn said the level of likely loathing was particularly acute in the Rocky Mountain states and on the West Coast.
In Illinois, Lunn found, residents in Clay County are most likely to be fond of Elvis: 73 percent of households were labeled Elvis Lovers.
“A lot of people in Clay County got TVs back when Ed Sullivan had him on,” said Ruth Ann Cooper, owner of the Hi-Way Cafe on U.S. Highway 45. “That’s one of the first things we saw. My folks bought a TV set so we could watch him.”
Cooper still treasures a yellowed copy of a Memphis newspaper from Aug. 16, 1977, the day Elvis died. Her house is filled with Elvis tapes, records, books and pictures, and she has a sweat shirt emblazoned with a reproduction of the Elvis postage stamp.
“There’s a lot of people around here that still talk about him,” said Cooper’s daughter, Glenda Cooper. “He was the most popular man a-goin.’ “
Perhaps surprisingly, three rural counties-Douglas, Schuyler and Stark-rank as having the lowest number of Elvis afficionados in the state, but scaring up an Elvis hater is no easy task.
In Douglas County, Phyllis Adams said she was shocked to learn that her neighbors despised her idol.
An image of Elvis graces the front of Adams’ checks, and she says she once passed out when Elvis kissed her and handed her his scarf during a 1972 performance in Las Vegas.
“I would have never suspected that,” Adams said of her neighbors’ alleged disdain. “You caught me totally by surprise. . . . I would have thought just the opposite.”
Stark County, where the survey suggests only 7 percent of the households would profess Elvis as The King, held a ’50s-era bash last summer in which an impersonator brought down the house.
Connie Wagher of Toulon, who previously was not a fan, was so touched by the faux Elvis’ performance that she decided to leave intact the Elvis memorabilia she had used to decorate her ice cream parlor during the town party.
“I wouldn’t say I was one of those people that would walk around and think he’s alive or anything,” she said. “But I like him.”