1957: Elvis is drafted

History.com has this for 20 December:

On this day in 1957, while spending the holidays at Graceland, his newly purchased Memphis, Tennessee mansion, rock-and-roll star Elvis Presley received a draft notice from the Army.
With a suggestive style– one writer called him Elvis the Pelvis– a hit movie, Love Me Tender, and a string of gold records including Heartbreak Hotel, Blue Suede Shoes, Hound Dog, and Don’t Be Cruel, Presley had become a national icon, and the world’s first rock-&-roll star, by the end of 1956. As the Beatles’ John Lennon once remarked: “Before Elvis, there was nothing.” The following year, at the peak of his career, Presley received his draft notice for a two-year stint in the Army. Fans sent tens of thousands of letters to the Army asking for him to be spared, but Elvis would have none of it. He received one deferment, during which he finished working on his movie King Creole, before being sworn in as a private in Memphis, Tennessee on 24 March 1958.
After six months of basic training, including an emergency leave to see his beloved mother, Gladys, before she died in August of 1958, Presley sailed to Europe on the USS General Randall. For the next eighteen months, he served in Company D, 32nd Tank Battalion, 3rd Armor Corps, in Friedberg, Germany, where he attained the rank of sergeant. For the rest of his service, he shared an off-base residence with his father, grandmother, and some Memphis friends. After working during the day, Presley returned home at night to host frequent parties and impromptu jam sessions. At one of these, an army buddy of Presley’s introduced him to fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu, whom Elvis would marry some years later. Meanwhile, Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, continued to release singles recorded before his departure, keeping the money rolling in and his most famous client fresh in the public’s mind. Widely praised for not seeking to avoid the draft or serve domestically, Presley was seen as a model for all young Americans. After he got his polio shot from an Army doctor on national television, vaccine rates among the American population shot from 2 percent to 85 percent by the time of his discharge on 2 March 1960.

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