Workers at Station Pumped Up as ‘Elvis’ Stops for Gas in Carlsbad

It was over as quickly as you could say “Elvis has left the gas station.”

That’s right, the manager and two employees of a Unocal 76 station in Carlsbad say they spotted Elvis Presley the other morning.

Drove right up in his pink Cadillac (you were expecting maybe a white Toyota?).

Got out to use the restroom, dropped his bag of french fries, did his business and paid for a fill-up with cash (plus a $5 tip).

“Thankyou, thankyouverymuch,” he said in that slurry, husky voice. Then drove off toward the beach.

That’s how station manager Don Gallacher tells it. So do the mechanic and cashier.

(Perry’s Rule of Workplace Apparitions: When the boss sees them, employees see them too. Particularly in a tight job market.)

“He looked good,” Gallacher said. “A little overweight maybe but good. Dressed in a very nice Western outfit.”

Gallacher said he’d always been suspicious that Elvis didn’t really die in 1977. “I watched that special with Bill Bixby and I figured it was possible he was alive.”

So what do you do when you spot Elvis? Call the tabloids? Place a small notice in the New Yorker?

Gallacher talked to Craig West, a disc jockey on KOW radio (92.1 FM), a “hot” country music station in Escondido. KOW is a clearinghouse for Elvis sightings.

Gallacher also placed a big sign in front of his station on Tamarack Avenue: “Elvis Sighting Here.”

Customers weren’t quite as convinced as you might think: “They’ve been kind of harassing us about it.”

Weird, isn’t it? You claim to have seen a dead man, and people get nervous about letting you repair the brakes on their $40,000 car.

Alas, the gas station gang let Elvis leave without getting his views on contemporary matters: Like which of the two postage proposals of his likeness he likes.

“I know we should have: not everybody believes, you know,” Gallacher said. “It takes time to digest these kind of things.”

I know what you mean. As I was saying recently to the Big Bopper (or was it Richie Valens?) . . .

T-Shirt Deal in the Pipeline

Read it and weep.

* Yes, the city of San Diego plans to sell T-shirts to commemorate the sewage spill off Point Loma.

One idea has a multicolor drawing with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the broken pipe chortling, “See! They think we’re a water hammer.”

Negotiations with the Turtles trademark holders are under way. No kidding.

* Remember J.T. (Tom) Hawthorne, the Kearny Mesa Caterpillar dealer who sits on the California Transportation Commission?

He got snagged in a conflict of interest because his heavy equipment was being used on public projects.

Last August he agreed to pay a $165,000 fine to the Fair Political Practices Commission. He paid $25,000 up front and promised to pay the rest in mid-February.

But now Hawthorne has gone to the FPPC complaining of cash flow problems and negotiated a payment schedule: $10,000 a month for six months, then a balloon payment, with $10% interest.

* North County humor.

License plate holder on a Mercedes on Interstate 5: “Have You Driven a Ford Lately?”

She’s Ready to Bare Everything

Hi-ho, the taxman must go.

Barbara Hutchinson, 65, of Rolando in East San Diego, who spent three years in prison on a tax beef (she called it a protest, the feds called it fraud), has decided to become a Libertarian candidate for Congress.

Everything is not going smoothly though.

Her plan to announce as Lady Godiva (symbolizing the government’s zeal to tax the clothes off our backs) went awry: “I couldn’t find an extra, extra, extra-large body-stocking.”

And the county registrar of voters won’t let her list herself as “Tax Protester” on the ballot. The secretary of state says only real professions can be listed.

“I am a tax protester,” Hutchinson said. “I paid the ultimate price,” in this case, prison.

If nothing else, she has a distinction none of the other candidates can touch: She was profiled in Playboy magazine (at the height of her tax battle).

She offered to pose for a centerfold covered only in 1040 forms, but was turned down.