My dad and I had just finished a game of golf when we heard the unbelievable news.

The "King" was suddenly, shockingly gone.

The sad, fateful day was Aug. 16, 1977. My father, Ronald Pace, was working at Diamond Shamrock in Muscle Shoals. Employees had a golf course at their disposal, and we had just come in from a leisurely late-summer round.

You'd think the so-called "generation gap" would have separated our musical tastes -- Dad would turn 39 that month, and I turned 15 six weeks later.

Yet we both loved Elvis -- from the rockers and the ballads to the gospel hymns and "American Trilogy." The news of his untimely, inexplicable death at 42 left us speechless.

My parents' well-worn Elvis 45s dated back to the Sun era, while his later releases -- including his final hit, "Way Down" -- lined my record rack.

All through the '60s, Mom and Dad would load me into the station wagon for family trips to the Mar-Bro Drive-In, where we'd watch Elvis sing, shake and sweet-talk the girls in cheesy popcorn pictures like "Viva Las Vegas" or "Spinout."

I made sure that my grandfather, John Cassimus, kept his Cassimus Café jukebox stocked with Elvis singles. "Suspicious Minds" was my favorite: I'd pop in quarters and dance and sing along.

A year before his death, we caught the "King" in concert at Von Braun in Huntsville. Winded, sluggish and bursting out of his gaudy Vegas seams, he still sounded magnificent.

Along the way, I discovered that my father had had earlier encounters with the "King." When Elvis gave three 1955 concerts at the Sheffield Community Center, Dad -- a 16-year-old junior at Sheffield High School -- saw him first.

"I was washing cars at Walt's Shell Station one day, and Duck Douthit was out front, pumping gas," Dad recalled. "A black-headed guy came in and walked up to this big mop sink, turned the water on full-blast, splashed it all over his face and hair, jerked his head back and left."

Dad asked his co-worker, "Who was that slob that splashed water all over the place?" Douthit replied, "I don't know, but he was driving a pink Cadillac."

That night, Dad went to work with two friends, Charlie Beck and future Florence mayor Eddie Frost, manning the center's concession stand.

"We were out front, selling Cokes," Dad told me. "All of a sudden we heard girls screaming inside. I went in to see what was going on -- and there was that guy. He was on stage, wiggling and singing and reaching out to touch the girls' hands. It was Elvis, and the girls were going crazy over him."

At a later Sheffield show, rock's rising "King" ordered refreshments backstage.

"We took him 10 or 15 Cokes," Dad recalled. "They weren't but 10 or 15 cents each, and he tipped us $15. That was $5 each. I didn't make but $5 a day at Walt's -- so we thought we were rich."

At first, Dad tells me, guys his age resented Elvis' hypnotic hold over his female fans.  "Later on," he says, "after we'd married those girls, we became big fans, too."

Terry Pace is the entertainment editor of the TimesDaily. He can be reached at 740-5741 or terry.pace@timesdaily.com.