Personality Wink Martindale Recalls His Relationship With Elvis

Legendary radio and television personality Wink Martindale remembered Elvis this past weekend on Fox & Friends ahead of the 42nd anniversary of the singer's death, August 16.

Martindale started his career as a disc jockey at age 17 at WPLI in Jackson, earning $1.02 a week. After moving to WTJS, he was hired away for double the salary by Jackson's only other station, WDXI.

 He next hosted mornings at WHBQ in Memphis while a college student at Memphis State University. The evening of July 10, 1954, he was showing the WHBQ studio to some friends when he realized that his colleague on the 9 p.m. to midnight shift, Dewey Phillips, was getting a lot of reactions from auditors after airing a new song. That song was Elvis Presley's first record, "That's All Right", recorded at Sam Phillips' recording studio on the evening of July 5, 1954.

DJ Phillips wanted to interview Elvis during his program, so Wink attempted to contact Elvis, but his mother Gladys answered the phone and said Elvis was so nervous that he had been to a movie theater.

Gladys and her husband Vernon brought Elvis to WHBQ and Dewey interviewed Elvis without his knowing that he was on the air (Wink reports that Elvis later admitted that he would have been unable to talk otherwise).

In 1959, he became morning man at KHJ in Los Angeles, moving a year later to the morning show at KRLA and finally to KFWB in 1962. He also had lengthy stays at KGIL from 1968 to 1971, KKGO/KJQI and Gene Autry's KMPC (now KSPN 710 AM from 1971 to 1979 and again from 1983 to 1987, the short-lived "Wink and Bill Show" on KABC during 1989, and KJQI from 1993 to 1994.