In 1973, Betty Lunn worked the information desk at the Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas.
She was the friendly face behind the counter, the person guests came to with their questions. She had no idea that one small request was about to give her a story she’d be telling for the rest of her life.
Elvis was the star attraction at another hotel in town. He’d been playing the International since 1969, and in 1971 that hotel became the Las Vegas Hilton. He kept performing there until 1976.
One day a casino host from the hotel where Elvis performed stopped by Betty’s desk. On a whim, she asked him for something. Could he get her a signed photo of Elvis?
It was the kind of thing people ask all the time and never hear about again.
Then Betty got back to work.
No camera was at the Tropicana for what happened next, but this old footage shows Elvis arriving at the International in 1970, the same hotel that casino host came from, and it gives you a sense of the hotel and the star at the center of this story.
Elvis arriving at the International Hotel in Las Vegas
A few days later, a man came up to Betty’s counter and asked for her.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal described him like this: “He wore slacks and a button-down shirt, and he was standing by himself.”
It was Elvis.
He had come to deliver the photo in person. Betty let him know he’d found the right woman. “I am Betty,” she said.
Elvis handed it over. “Well, this is for you.”
The headliner from another hotel had come to the Tropicana’s information desk on his own, just to hand a signed picture to the desk clerk who had asked for one.
So what did Betty say back?
Not much. She thanked him for bringing his own photo, and that was about all that came out. “I couldn’t think of anything else to say,” she told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
What bothered her for years afterward was what she didn’t say. Betty was born in Winfield, Alabama, and she kicked herself for not telling him so. In her words, “That’s only 30 miles out from where Elvis grew up.”
It would have been an easy way to start a little conversation, one Southerner to another. Instead the moment passed.
She shared the story with the paper when she was 74 and living in Las Vegas. It ran around the time Cirque du Soleil’s “Viva Elvis” show opened at Aria, which dates it to about early 2010, more than 35 years after Elvis came looking for her at the Tropicana.
What stayed with her all that time was those few seconds at the counter, with Elvis standing right there, when she couldn’t find the words.