Elvis Display Will Be the Center’s Attention

In a town where news comes in the form of another new frozen yogurt store or another coffee shop on Valley Parkway, Escondido is in for some real excitement:

The Elvis Presley Museum will be coming to town next month for a four-day appearance at the Escondido Village Mall.

Straight from Graceland (and a few other shopping malls along the way), the display--consisting of 16 showcases and a Cadillac--will be available for local gawking from May 14-17.

There will be clothes, jewelry, albums, guns, tapes of concerts and other memorabilia worn, used or touched by The King, who died 10 years ago this Aug. 16.

Bringing Presley’s proxy presence to Escondido “is quite a coup,” said Sandra Holley, marketing director for the shopping mall.

The museum-on-wheels is one of two licensed by Presley’s estate for tours throughout the country, and they typically end up at shopping malls as promotional gimmicks to drum up business.

The mall is spending $5,000 to bring Elvis’ road show to Escondido. But that’s just pocket change for the mall, which spent $8 million renovating the place 1 1/2 years ago so it could better battle the huge North County Fair shopping center a couple of miles away.

Despite the renovation, the mall is still having a rough go of it; of 72 store sites, only 50 are occupied.

Presley’s museum is a cut above the normal art, car or antique show that has been brought in by the Escondido Village Mall in recent years. For that matter, the display may be even more exciting than when TV host Bob Eubanks brought his “Newlywed Game” to the mall.

Not Quite Full Sale

San Diego Hardware, the downtown landmark that was closed by fire Thanksgiving Day in the midst of expansion, is back open for business, sort of.

The grand opening is being planned for June, but two of the store’s seven departments, albeit somewhat understocked, opened for business Monday. So you don’t have to wait until June to buy items from its plumbing department or its fastener-and-metal department.

Next to open, in a few weeks, will be the paint, sundries and electrical departments, reports Charles (Rip) Fleming, one of the owners of the popular Gaslamp Quarter store.

The place isn’t quite as quaint as it use to be. Not only is it 20% larger, but its cash registers are linked to the inventory control computers.

Fare-Minded Rangers

The rangers at Cabrillo National Monument began assessing $1 admission fees March 1, but getting the money was easier said than done.

The monument was one of 73 formerly free National Park Service attractions that were authorized by Congress on a one-year trial basis to charge user fees to raise money for expanded programs and longer park hours.

When the park rangers first started collecting fees, they set up a table in the breezeway next to the traffic circle. Problem was, a whole bunch of people never walked through the breezeway, and rangers estimate that less than half of the monument’s visitors paid the fee.

Next, they moved the admission booth to near where the tour buses unload. That was better, but still, not everyone was getting the hook.

Then, they put the ticket counter at the door to the souvenir book store. Disaster. People thought you had to pay to get into the souvenir shop, and business that day was dreadful.

Finally, the rangers moved the admission booth to near the entrance of the parking lot, which slows down traffic a bit but is bringing in the bucks.

“Had Congress given us permanent authorization to collect fees, instead of just on a one-year trial basis, we would have put up an actual entrance station,” Ranger Bob Randall said.

Over the Easter weekend, more than $4,200 in fees were collected, he said.

3 Winning Ways

Finally, in our Department of Education, these items:

- Vance Vanier is a 13-year-old student at Gompers Junior High School in Southeast San Diego who won a first-place grand prize in the San Diego Historical Society’s international history fair essay contest, as well as a gold and silver medal for his work in the California Science Olympiad.

We got news of this not through the school, the historical people or the Olympiad folks, but from his proud parents, who felt so good about their son that they issued their own press release.

- Nancy Peets, a first-grade teacher at Escondido’s North Broadway school, keeps busy after classes and on weekends. Armed with a clipboard list of her students who play T-ball baseball and a schedule and location of their games, Peets makes the rounds from ballfield to ballfield.

“Every one of her students knows that their teacher has come to see them play,” noted school board trustee Sid Hollins in passing kudos along to her.

- In a statewide clothing design contest held recently in San Francisco, the winner was Tamaki Suzuki, a student at Chula Vista’s Southwest High School, who presented a metallic creation.

The contest was sponsored by the Daughters of the American Revolution; winner Suzuki is a foreign exchange student from Japan.