Joe Esposito, R.I.P.

Above, Joe Esposito and Elvis Presley at Memphis Airport in 1974.

I don't know how I could have missed this story, considering that I visited Graceland last month, but somehow I did.

The New York Times reported:

Joe Esposito, who was Elvis Presley’s right-hand man, close friend and road manager for nearly two decades, died on Wednesday at his home in Calabasas, Calif. He was 78. 

The cause was complications of dementia, his daughter Cindy Bahr said. 

Mr. Esposito met Presley in 1959, when both men were serving at an Army base in Friedberg, in what was then West Germany. “It was just a click,” Mr. Esposito told Larry King on CNN in 2002. “There was something I liked about him, and something he liked about me, too.” They became fast friends, and Presley asked Mr. Esposito to work for him after they left the Army. 

Mr. Esposito, detail-oriented and dependable, became an invaluable assistant, organizing Presley’s daily life, acting as his personal alarm clock and reading lines back and forth on film sets. 

“When you worked for Elvis it wasn’t eight hours a day or 10 hours a day,” he told The Las Vegas Sun in 2007. “It was 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because we did everything together. We went on vacations together. We traveled together. Everything we ever did we all did it together.”

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