Don Kinney was a morning TV anchor in Denver, the kind of newsman local folks watched with their coffee. One day in early 1976 his co-anchor said on the air that she’d love to run into Elvis Presley up in Aspen. Kinney wasn’t having it. “How inappropriate can you get? Goodbye!” he said, and moved the show along.
Then the phone rang.
The voice on the other end said he’d liked the way Kinney handled her. “That was really good. Now would you like to have a car?” Kinney was sure one of his buddies was messing with him. “No thanks. Who is this?” The caller said, “This is Elvis.”
So Kinney hung up. The phone rang again, same voice, same offer. He hung up again. This went back and forth a good while.
The funny part is Kinney had a history with Elvis, and it wasn’t a warm one. Twenty years earlier he’d been a young DJ in Montana, and he once threatened to quit his job because he couldn’t stand having to play Elvis records all day. Now the man himself was on the phone trying to hand him a Cadillac.
What Kinney didn’t know was that Elvis really was in Colorado that January, and he’d been giving cars away. He’d already bought Cadillacs for a few Denver men he had gotten friendly with: police captain Jerry Kennedy, detective Ron Pietrafeso and a police doctor named Gerald Starkey. Buying cars for people he liked was just something Elvis did when the mood hit him.
No film of that phone call exists, but here’s Elvis out in the Colorado snow during that same winter stretch, a world away from a stage.
Elvis on his winter trip to Colorado in 1976
The calls to Kinney kept coming. Finally detective Pietrafeso got on the line himself to vouch for the whole thing. “For God’s sake, Don! He wants to give you a car!” That got Kinney’s attention. His bosses at the station weren’t sure a newsman was even allowed to take a gift like that, so they ran it past a lawyer, who told him he could keep it.
So which one did he pick? Elvis had more than one waiting. Kinney, worn down by then, finally said, “Oh, the blue one. Now will you leave me alone!” He got himself a brand-new Cadillac, and he drove it for years after that.
He never did feel right about profiting from it, though. In 1985 Kinney gave the Cadillac to the Forney Museum of Transportation in Denver, with just 22,600 miles on it, and the car was put on display there. “The boys and I were determined we would not profit from that gift,” he said. “So the car will not be sold.”
That’s how a gift the man first mistook for a prank went from a Denver newsroom to a museum floor. The footage above won’t show the call, but it puts you right there in the Colorado of that odd, generous winter.