This month, Elvis movies have been front and center on several television stations as a tribute to the late Elvis Presley, who would have been 80 on Jan. 8.

We were just starting high school in 1956 when his first big single, “Heartbreak Hotel,” hit number one on the charts, and from that point on, he became an overnight rock ‘n’ roll star, even though he was barely out of the teen years himself.

Students at Boothbay Region High School were crazy about him, as were teens all over the world, and his records sold by the thousands. He had hit after hit, including “Love Me Tender,” “GI Blues,” “Blue Hawaii” and “All Shook Up.”

The list goes on and on. His fans even supported his movies, and it really didn’t matter that he wasn’t much of an actor. His singing made up for it, along with all the pretty girls appearing in his movies.

He earned notoriety when he appeared on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” and adults everywhere shook their heads in disgust at his gyrations which they found obscene. It was his voice, however, which sustained him over the years; you didn’t have to see him to enjoy his music.

Elvis was a church-goer from an early age, thanks to his religious mother, Gladys, and so it wasn’t hard to understand that he enjoyed singing gospel music. My husband’s grandmother, about as old-fashioned as they come, loved listening to Elvis sing hymns and he won several Grammy awards for his gospel albums — “How Great Thou Art,” “There’ll Be Peace In The Valley,” “He Touched Me” and scores of others.

In 1977, shortly before his death, he was scheduled to appear at the Augusta Civic Center, so a number of us got together and decided we’d try to get tickets.

My husband and two friends, Charlie Begin and David Norton, headed for Augusta the night (or maybe late afternoon) before the tickets were to go on sale and took their place in the long line, waiting for the ticket office to open the following morning.

They waited about 16 hours, as we recall, and were successful in getting tickets. My husband had always been an avid Elvis fan, but as luck would have it, he and Charlie, partners in a stop seining operation, got a shut-off of sardines (closing off a cove with twine) and couldn’t attend the concert. The rest of us went.

We had seen what we’ll call the “carryings-on” of  girls whenever Elvis appeared, screaming and swooning, but we were totally unprepared  to see grown women our age and much older doing the same thing at the Civic Center concert. We found ourselves looking around us in disbelief at their antics. After all, they weren’t teenagers any more.

Elvis’ lifestyle had already caught up with him at that point in his career. He had gained a substantial amount of weight and didn’t resemble in any way the teenage idol he’d been 20 years earlier. He kept forgetting the words and would turn to his back-up band members to “fill in” for him. Sad. Very sad.

When we left the concert that night, we almost wished we hadn’t gone at all. Watching a successful young singer obviously in trouble with major health issues wasn’t pretty.

My husband and Charlie were successful in getting tickets for Elvis’ scheduled appearance in Portland a few weeks later. Elvis never made it. He died before the concert at the age of 42, but his music and legend lives on.

Since that time, we’ve watched other popular entertainers follow his path, using drugs to help them maintain demanding schedules to keep their fans happy and eventually succumbing to the pressure.

Perhaps the public expects too much of its entertainers and forgets that they, too, are entitled to a private life.