Sometimes it takes only a tank of gas to travel back in time. 
Six hours south of Springfield on Interstate 55, time does seem to have stopped in Memphis, Tenn., first in 1968, and again in 1977. 
The Lorraine Hotel facade, now the front of the National Civil Rights Museum, looks exactly as it did when Martin Luther King Jr. left his room and was assassinated on April 6, 1968. The interiors of Rooms 306 and 307 have been re-created to appear as they did at the time. 
Graceland, the mansion where Elvis Presley lived until his death on Aug. 16, 1977, also is a tourist destination that gives one that “Twilight Zone” feeling of being elsewhere on the continuum. 
The recent trip we made to Memphis was a mid-winter break mainly for my husband’s amusement. He has been an Elvis fan since childhood, when he’d regularly ask his parents to take him to Graceland.

Not exactly dressed for a sprint, Steve Farris and two of his daughters escape the cold evening air by dashing across the parking lot, hand in hand, toward the Illinois Department of Transportation building. 

Nine-year-old Elizabeth Farris knows what to expect on the other side of the glass doors, but her younger sister, 6-year-old Victoria, has only heard secondhand. 

Inside, a disc jockey’s bass thumps as the girls get their corsages and pose for Polaroids, prom-style. Victoria stays close to her father, taking it all in. 

​“Let’s go dance,” he says, and they enter