By MICHAEL LOLLAR, Scripps Howard News Service

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - Elvis Presley's birthday -- he would have been 77 on Sunday -- is a milestone this year, which marks both the 35th anniversary year of his death and the 30th year since Graceland set out on the "grand adventure" that turned it into one of the best-known tourist attractions on the planet.

GRAND JUNCTION, Tenn. - Here once was the home of American Indians with a culture far removed from the tepees, wigs and wigwams of TV Indians.

A village slowly being unearthed on the Ames Plantation was a distant neighbor to Memphis' Chucalissa Indian Village. The residents were among hundreds of Mississippian Culture villages along the waterways of the Mississippi River Valley.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - Graceland and the British museum devoted to the Beatles are jointly curating an exhibit on Elvis Presley's influence on the upstart foursome who became the world's best-known rock 'n' roll band.

TURRELL, Ark. - On her first night in her new home in this town's former post office, Bernice Claxton's eyes flew wide open when a freight train rumbled by.

"I want to go back" to Memphis, said Claxton, 64, who'd grown up there and worked as a maid. Then she and her minister husband left for a quieter life in a little Arkansas town pronounced "turl."

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - An array of surgical and other instruments allegedly used in the 1977 embalming of Elvis Presley's body was withdrawn Thursday from a planned auction after Memphis Funeral Home objected to the auction of property taken without the funeral home's consent.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - Instruments supposedly used in the embalming of Elvis Presley are going up for auction, but the president of Memphis Funeral Home was skeptical about the authenticity of items including surgical instruments, a toe tag and eyeliner included in auction lots.

"Anybody could fake something like this. It's ridiculous," funeral-home president E.C. Daves said Wednesday.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - Seventy-eight-year-old Annie Laura Jones was in fourth grade, when her family hung a star on the front window to honor her uncle, John C. Kelley. He was missing in action, after a dogfight with the Japanese during the Burma invasion in 1943.

The long search for Kelley may be ending soon.

MEMPHIS - Beyond the Grateful Dead posters, lava lamps and candles, area head shops are doing a booming business in products labeled as "incense," but often sold with the purchase of roll-your-own papers.

Priscilla Presley says Elvis Presley "had such a young spirit" that she can't imagine him as a 75-year-old man, but if he were still alive, she says he would be primarily a gospel singer, ending his career with the music of his roots.

She says it is "mind-boggling" that the rock idol she married in 1967 is still a global attraction and musical presence.

The "joke" in her family was that Barbara Hearn dated Elvis Presley "steadily for a year."

Hearn was going steady. She even wrote a column about dating in 16 Magazine and told fans how she "taught him everything he knows" about kissing.