LOS ANGELES (AP) — Kruse GWS Auctions announced Wednesday, Elvis Presley fans, if they have the money, can take to the road in his personal white 1973 stretch limousine (the car the music icon often used to get around Memphis, Tennessee), a GMC pickup truck that has since been restored or his last motorcycle, a 1976 Harley Davidson FLH 1200 Electra Glide. The auction house said the items will be part of its Artifacts of Hollywood auction on August 31.
Elvis Presley’s keys to his 1973 stretch limousine.
In the Persian Gulf on this day in 1988, the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes shoots down an Iranian passenger jet that it mistakes for a hostile Iranian fighter aircraft. Two missiles were fired from the American warship–the aircraft was hit, and all 290 people aboard were killed. The attack came near the end of the Iran-Iraq War, when U.S. vessels were in the gulf defending Kuwaiti oil tankers. Minutes before Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down, the Vincennes had engaged Iranian gunboats that shot at its helicopter.
Iran called the downing of the aircraft a “barbaric massacre,” but U.S. officials defended the action, claiming that the aircraft was outside the commercial jet flight corridor, flying at only 7,800 feet, and was on a descent toward the Vincennes. However, one month later, the United States acknowledged that the airbus was in the commercial flight corridor, flying at 12,000 feet, and not descending. The U.S. Navy report blamed crew error caused by psychological stress on men who were in combat for the first time. In 1996, the U.S. agreed to pay $62 million in damages to the families of the Iranians killed in the attack.
On this day in 1994, the U.S. Figure Skating Association stripped Tonya Harding of the 1994 national championship and banned her from the organization for life for an attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan.
Tonya Maxene Price (Harding) will be 49 in November. She was born in Portland, Oregon.
