Elvis Worth It, "Doubly So"
by Tommy Stevenson
Tuscaloosa News
August 30, 1976

The dictates of supply and demand have apparently determined that the privilege of seeing Elvis Presley here tonight is worth about twice what the $12.50 tickets cost originally.

In the past few weeks as many as a dozen sellers of "Elvis tickets" have, for one reason or the other, put their prizes up for sale though News want ads with prices ranging from $25 to $50 to "best offer."

But, a quick check of the ads listed on the eve of the concert shows the sellers were much more likely to unload the tickets at $25 than $50, even though some of the tickets being sold for the higher prices cost the owners a pretty penny in the first place.

Sylvia Henry of Greensboro is a case in point. She says she paid $35 and $45 for her five tickets (listed as "good seats"), but now says she may have to settle for $25 each and take a loss.

"I've had plenty of calls but not buyers yet," she says of the tickets she wanted to get $50 for.

"I paid $45 for two of them and $35 for the other three and now I'm asking $35 for the lot of them. But I may have to take $25 if I can't find anybody to buy them in a hurry."

Miss Henry says she ended up with so many tickets, "because I just kept buying them and buying them until I got the best seat I could afford."

She did not say where that best seat she could afford is, but added if she had the money she could have been front and center tonight.

"I talked to some man who said he'd sell me a front row seat for $250," she says . "But I just told him he was crazy - I wasn't going to pay $250, even for Elvis."

But Miss Henry adds she doesn't intend to let her lack of success in selling the tickets spoil her fun tonight when Elvis takes the stage in Memorial Coliseum.

"Oh, I will have fun, you can count on that," she says. "I'll have fun if I have to light my cigarettes with the extra tickets."

Miss Henry would probably have had better luck in getting rid of her tickets if she had followed the lead of Mr. and Mrs. Grover Faulkner who offered two tickets "on row 18, on floor" for $25 each and "sold them the first day," according to Mrs. Faulkner.

"We didn't have any trouble getting rid of them for that price and they went in a hurry," she says.

Mrs. Faulkner says she and her husband had originally planned to go to the show, but "he works at the rubber plant and has been out on strike for four months.

"We decided we needed the money more than we needed to go to the show."

She adds, however, that has already seen Elvis twice and takes some consolation in that: "it's not like we've never seen him before."

Denise and Jeffrey Crawford took another approach and were met with mixed results. They advertised their eight tickets for "$50 each or best offer" and added that they are "Good to very good seats."

But by this morning, they had sold only one of them for the top price, although Crawford added, "we're going to sell five others today for $40 and $30 to some people who have called us."

The Crawfords' luck is much better than that of Ray Bigham, who is advertising six tickets at a flat $50 each, but has yet to sell any of them.

"I guess I'm asking too much," admits Bigham, who says he has excess tickets, "because my two oldest sons say they don't want to go.

"One of them has a softball game tonight and I guess he'd rather play than see Elvis."

Bigham estimates he had "about 20 calls" about the tickets and says if he doesn't get what he is asking for them by show time tonight at 8:30 p.m., "maybe I'll just take $50 for the pair and forget about it."

The average ticket price for the sold-out performance tonight was $12.50

Courtesy of Archie Bald