By the mid-1950s Elvis Presley was the most talked-about young man in America. Girls screamed. Parents worried. And right in the middle of all that noise stood a heavyset man with a cigar named Colonel Tom Parker.
Parker was Elvis’s manager, the man who ran the business side of everything Elvis did. He wasn’t a real colonel and that wasn’t really his name, but he was one of the sharpest salesmen the music world had ever seen. If Elvis’s name could go on something, the Colonel found a way to sell it.
In those years he put Elvis’s name on just about anything you can think of. Lipstick, scarves, charm bracelets, record players, stuffed hound dogs. And buttons. Little pin-on buttons that teenagers wore so the whole school knew who they loved. Those ones said “I LOVE ELVIS,” and kids bought them by the boxful.
Here’s where the Colonel’s mind went somewhere most people’s never would.
Not every teenager in America loved Elvis. Plenty of them thought he was too loud, or too silly, or just not their thing. A lot of their parents felt the same. So there was a whole crowd of people the Colonel hadn’t sold anything to yet.
According to Elvis biographer Alanna Nash, who wrote the book “The Colonel,” Parker reportedly “tied on a vendor’s apron” and sold a second button right next to the first. This one was made for the people who couldn’t stand Elvis. It said “I HATE ELVIS.”
He worked both buttons off the same tray. Love him? Here’s your pin. Can’t stand him? Here’s yours. Either way the nickel ended up in the same pocket. Some versions of the hate button reportedly went a step further and read “Elvis is a Jerk.”
The fun of it, if you want to call it that, is that the Colonel didn’t care which side you were on. He just wanted his money for the pin.
Nobody knows for sure why he thought of it, or when, and Nash doesn’t say. It just fit the way the man’s brain worked. There’s a famous story she tells about a magazine that ran a rough piece on Elvis. Everybody around the Colonel was upset about it. Parker thought for a second. “Well,” he finally said, “did they spell his name right?”
That was Parker all over. Any attention was good attention, and any attention could be turned into a sale.
The wild part is those “I HATE ELVIS” buttons are real, and collectors still hunt for them today. An original one in good shape can fetch real money at auction, far more than it ever cost some grumpy kid back then. The folks who couldn’t stand him were walking around with little pieces of history pinned to their shirts.
So next time you spot an old Elvis pin at a flea market, give it a close look. It might not say quite what you’d expect.