After Elvis died, Vernon insisted that he tried real hard to find a place in Memphis where he could live with his family and do war work too. He said he would knock on a door, in Memphis, that was advertising a place to rent. The landlord would ask about his family. A wife was okay, it seems, but when he said that he had a little boy, he would be sent away, sometimes abruptly as if he had presumed too much. Vernon implied that Elvis, simply by his existence, caused this separation between himself and Gladys. It was not easy, but other people came to Memphis to work during the war and found housing for their spouses and their children. Moreover, he had brought Gladys and Elvis with him to Ozark and Moss Point where he found lucrative war work, but soon quit both jobs.
All of this—the money, the knowledge that he was in high demand as a worker, perhaps the interest of attractive women whose husbands were away in the war, the relative lack of competition from other young men, the sheer distance from the Lee County jail and Parchman Farm—gave Vernon in his midtwenties more than enough to inflate his ego. World War II, it seems, was liberating Africa, Europe, Asia, and Vernon Presley.
Returning from Pascagoula and settling his family in East Tupelo again during the summer of 1943, Vernon went to work for L. P. McCarty and Son, a wholesale grocery business in Tupelo. Although he described himself on his income tax statement for 1943 as a salesman for McCarty and Son, there was not much selling to do in his job. He actually drove a truck delivering goods ordered by grocery stores for a dozen or more miles around Tupelo. It was a great job for a man who liked moving about, driving a truck, and, most of all, avoiding a boss who watched his every move. He stuck with that job, with one or two interruptions, for the next five years. The problem was that the job did not pay well.
The difference in weekly earnings between Vernon’s war work and his truck driving was glaringly evident in his 1943 tax statement. At the shipyard near Pascagoula, he had earned $353 in five weeks, or about $70 a week. In working for McCarty for almost six months, he was paid $540, or about $21 a week. For the whole year, he earned $1,233, about $24 a week. Vernon apparently spent a lot of days in the first half of 1943 not working at all. His pay at McCarty’s was very low, but it was a job he clearly liked.
Elvis in School
While the war raged on, Elvis attended elementary school. In September 1941, he entered the first grade at East Tupelo Consolidated School. The consolidated school was created in 1926 by bringing together a number of small schools in the area. Economies of scale paid off magnificently in central heating, electric lighting, indoor plumbing, a gym, a playing field, and a student body that rose to about seven hundred students in twelve grades taught by thirty-six teachers—a comfortable ratio of about twenty students for each teacher. Superbly led by educator Ross Lawhon and staffed by well-educated and highly dedicated teachers, the new school became known as the best-run school in the county. It provided country kids—many of them bused in—with a substantial measure of preparation for their entrance into the modern world. For example, the high school under Lawhon developed special programs in agriculture, home economics, and business. Soon it also produced winning football teams, award-winning bands, and a well-deserved pride in itself. In the mid-1930s, it added a lunchroom—yet another highly successful project of the WPA—which allowed more hours to be added to the students’ school day.
Gladys, who had perhaps achieved a third-grade level of education, was totally supportive of Elvis’s schooling. Neighbors noted that every morning for years she would walk him the few blocks to and from school. For both mother and son, the public school was a bastion of order, sympathy, and steady support in a household that was recurrently thrown into turmoil and anxiety by the husband and father.
Elvis also enjoyed his first great success as an entertainer during these early school years. In 1943, at age eight, he sang on local radio accompanied on guitar by a man who had become his living idol, country and western singer Mississippi Slim. Slim’s real name was Carvel Lee Ausborn. He regularly performed on Tupelo’s station WELO, often with a local band, the Lee County Ramblers.
All over the South in pretelevision days there were country and western musicians like Mississippi Slim performing regularly on local radio, often sponsored by the producer of some miracle elixir or an economically priced furniture company, just as surely as the noontime obituaries would be sponsored by a local funeral home and read between clips of the hymn “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me.” Around town, the performer would stand out with his bold attire. In a community where men wore either overalls or khakis or coats and ties according to their station in life, he would stride about in cowboy boots, a silver buckle on his belt, dangling tassels on his jacket, and a ten-gallon hat. Usually, just in case you might not know who he was, he also carried his guitar wherever he went. Often he had a sidekick, younger, shorter, thinner, less handsome, and less voluble than he.
In Anderson County, South Carolina, for example, the singing cowboy was called “Tex.” He performed on WAIM along with his apprentice, “Georgia Boy.” They were sponsored by Hadacol, a marvelously restorative drink sold by a highly successful entrepreneur who floated into town and began to bottle the product in a small red-brick building on South Main Street that had been a corner branch of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, “the A&P,” before the advent of self-service required large stores with grocery carts and checkout stands. The Hadacol man covered all the windows in his building, and the door was always closed as if visitors were not welcome. The contents of Hadacol were both secret and suspect, like Coca-Cola, which many contemporaries thought contained a touch of cocaine. Somehow, local authorities were never able to determine exactly what was in Hadacol or what might be wrong with it. Knowing persons thought that the major active ingredient, unadvertised, was alcohol of a high proof. In any event, many local ladies of undeniable sobriety testified to its great medicinal value. Meanwhile, the Hadacol king bought one of the largest and most famous houses on North Main Street and tooled around at least three counties in a huge automobile.
Elvis was enthralled by Mississippi Slim. Ernest Bowen, an announcer at WELO, said that Elvis got Slim’s attention by “following him around like a pet dog.” Elvis tried to attend every show Slim put on at WELO, often hitch-hiking over from East Tupelo. Reggie Bell, one of the Lee County Wranglers, would sometimes pick Elvis up in front of the C&A Cleaners in East Tupelo and bring him to the station, where he would sit quietly and watch the show. Reggie worked regularly as an automobile mechanic. Finally, on one glorious occasion, Slim played guitar while Elvis sang on WELO’s Saturday afternoon amateur program. After the show, Slim declared that Elvis had done pretty well considering his age, but complained that “the kid can’t keep time.” Even so, subsequently he sometimes had Elvis sing on his show.
In September 1945, when he was ten, Elvis’s gift as a singer led his elementary school to enter him in the talent contest held yearly in Tupelo as a part of the annual Mississippi-Alabama Mid-South State Fair and Dairy Show. His talent had been discovered by his fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. J. C. (Oleta) Grimes, the daughter of Orville Bean. She persuaded the principal of the East Tupelo Consolidated School to enter him into the contest as a candidate sponsored by the school. In the show, Elvis stood on a box behind the microphone and sang “Old Shep,” one of his favorites. Winners were identified by popular applause from an audience of about two thousand people. Elvis won fifth place. He had found his prestige piece—his singing voice.
A Bad Year—1946
On August 18, 1945, three days after the Japanese surrendered in Tokyo Bay, Vernon put down $200 in cash toward buying a brand-new, solid (“tongue-in-groove wooden siding”) four-room house on Berry Street at the foot of the hill just below the little house where Elvis was born. The purchase price was $2,000. The seller was Orville Bean, the man who more than any other had sent Vernon to prison and then did more, perhaps, than any other man to get him out by writing a letter to the governor. Now, Bean supplied the
Presleys with their second house.
Vernon always spent whatever money he made and spent it quickly. Where he got $200 to make a down payment on this new home is unknown. Quite possibly, he got it from his mother, Minnie Mae. Probably Minnie Mae brought her own assets to her marriage to Jessie and likely managed to keep some of them after the marriage. Just as Jessie clearly preferred his son Vester, Minnie Mae clearly favored Vernon.
In 1945, the Presleys moved up in the world, but during 1946 they fell terribly—very close to the bottom. In July, they lost their new house. Vernon and Gladys had not done the basic math on the mortgage and fell behind in their payments. The math was not difficult. Vernon had committed himself to pay $30 a month on the loan when about $24 would have been much more manageable. His weekly pay was only $22, which came to roughly $95 a month. After taxes and other expenses, the Presleys would have mighty little to live on. In those times, the rule of thumb was that rent or mortgage payments should not exceed a quarter of one’s income. It was a good rule, and for the great majority of people it worked well.
Bean took possession of the house again and sold it to Vernon’s friend Aaron Kennedy for $3,000. Aaron made a very substantial down payment of $760. Why Vernon himself did not resell his house for the $1,000 over what he had paid is a mystery. Certainly he was behind in his payments and could be held responsible for paying them off even if Bean foreclosed the mortgage. As it was, the mortgage was not legally foreclosed; there is no record of such a proceeding in the records of the Probate Court in the Lee County courthouse. Perhaps he was simply unwilling to enter a contest with Bean, and his friend Aaron bailed him out of the difficulty.
The rapid escalation in the value of the Berry Street house signaled a national phenomenon that determined where the Presley family would live over the next several years. After the war, as veterans came home and rejoined or started families, there was a severe housing shortage in America. Vernon had actually beat the veterans to the market and got an excellent house at a good price before the crunch came. But in 1946 the veterans were home again, and the competition for any place to live became exceedingly keen. For the Presleys from 1946 into 1954, the struggle was always hard, and too often it was desperate.
Tupelo Proper
In July 1946, when Elvis was eleven, the family moved out of its sturdy new four-room home in East Tupelo and settled in a shack on the edge of the city dump in Tupelo proper. The run-down wooden structure they occupied on Mulberry Alley lay on the eastern edge of town in a mostly black neighborhood called “Shake-Rag.” The name came from the assumption that the people who lived there wore rags. On wash days, they hung out their clothes on a line to dry. If there was wind, the raggedy clothes shook, signaling the poverty of the residents. In the eyes of the community, a white man in either Tupelo or East Tupelo could not have sunk further down in housing his family.
When Elvis started the sixth grade at Milam Junior High School in Tupelo in September 1946, his exceedingly low status in the social hierarchy became painfully apparent. East Tupelo had its own public school, and Milam included all the children of the wealthiest, best-educated, and most prestigious families in town as well as the poorest. Everyone in the school—students, teachers, and principal—was exceedingly conscious of precisely where in the social pyramid he or she and everyone else stood. It all depended on who “your people” were. Elvis was at the bottom, if not somewhere below the bottom, because his father was Vernon Presley, an ex-convict who drove a delivery truck, and he lived in a run-down shack in Shake-Rag near the city dump and among blacks. Evelyn Helms, also a student at Milam, recalled how other students used to laugh at Elvis because his house had no front porch.
Elvis’s lack of status at Milam is still clearly visible in the formal photograph taken of his sixth-grade homeroom class. The students are posed with their teacher on several steps leading up to the school. Elvis, relatively slender and small, is the only one of twenty-four students (twelve girls and twelve boys) wearing overalls. His feet were hidden, but he is the only one without shoes. In East Tupelo, a school boy of eleven in overalls and barefooted in warm weather would have been totally unremarkable. Elvis is also the only child in the photograph not clearly smiling or making a pleasing face for the camera. Elvis felt keenly the class prejudices of his schoolmates. During the 1946–47 and 1947–48 school years, from boyhood into puberty, he felt it virtually every day.
Sundays
Saving grace for the Presleys would come on Sundays. Vernon’s employer allowed him to use the company truck to carry his family the long flat mile across the causeway and bridge over to East Tupelo to attend the Assembly of God Tabernacle. The building was not grand, but it was their church, and Vernon was still a deacon.
The congregation had a new minister, nineteen-year-old Frank Smith from Meridian, Mississippi. Reverend Smith sang and played the guitar. The Presleys joined in the singing. They sang about getting along with “meager fare” in this life, but flying away to glory on some future happy morning. One song they surely sang declared that “this world is not my home, I have no mansion here” and then moved on to contemplate their future life in a superior mansion in the sky. The Presleys decidedly had no mansion here, but in that little church on the edge of a swamp that had been drained to make a mile-wide stretch of farmland, they had a home for their souls. A literal reading of the Bible gave them a universe, and their songs gave them a simple and practical philosophy to deal with a life that seemed unfair and precarious. In those years in the South, new songs flowed into a continuing stream of gospel music to generate worldviews that made the lives of believers comprehensible, manageable, and even joyous in the face of a rapidly changing and often threatening material world. A line from one of the favorites of those years declared that “I heard a wreck on the highway, but I didn’t hear nobody pray.” Lyrics compressed truth into a few words like poetry. Put to music, they were easily remembered, savored, and earnestly and endlessly repeated. The church was a place where family and faith joined to make life whole, to put their minds at ease.
Elvis’s homeroom teacher in the sixth grade, his first year at Milam, was Mrs. Dewey M. Camp. While organizing a talent show among her students at the beginning of the school year, she discovered Elvis. “He was so good,” she recalled forty years later, so good in fact that she took him around to perform in the other two sixth-grade classrooms. His audiences were impressed, and every day thereafter he brought his guitar to school and would play and sing at the mere hint of an invitation.
Elvis got an audience, but he did not get acceptance. “Then, as now, if you weren’t in the clique you were out,” recalled Evelyn Riley, another Milam student. “We did enjoy listening to him sing. But Elvis was not popular.”
1010 North Green
In 1947, the Presleys moved into a comfortable little house at 1010 North Green Street, several blocks north of downtown. It was a house that almost no white people in Tupelo would have taken. It sat squarely in the middle of what whites called “Darktown.” Elvis at age twelve could look out a back window of his home and see the black public school a hundred yards or so across a narrow weed-and-vine-covered ravine. Several buildings south on Green Street, above and just at the crest of a long, low hill, was the intersection that marked the heart of the African American community in Tupelo. All around this center were black-owned stores, cafes, a pool hall, a barber shop, a beauty parlor, a funeral parlor, the African American Masonic Lodge, the Elks Club, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, other churches, the black high school, the black graveyard, and the Sterling Library for African-Americans.
When Elvis walked to town or school he would have walked the short distance south up to the crest of the hill, then down the long slope on Green. On his left he might pass a pool hall with black music pulsing out of a jukebox, voices talking and laughing, the click and clatter of sticks and billiard balls, the hooded lamps and clouds of tobacco smoke over green baize covered tables. Green Street ran down the low
hill alongside the white cemetery for a very long block, then through the more affluent part of town. At Jefferson Street, Elvis could turn right and walk three blocks to Milam school or left a couple of blocks to downtown where he might see a movie at the upscale Lyric Theater, across the street from the stone Confederate soldier on the courthouse square. More likely he would walk on down to the Strand Theater on West Main Street, where the movies were less pretentious and tickets, at ten cents each, were cheaper.
In East Tupelo, Elvis had lived in a virtually all-white community. Overwhelmingly, the whites there were working class. On North Green, he lived in the middle of a black world, where he gained an intimacy with that culture that was rare among white people. Elvis’s exposure was different even from that of his parents, since he came to know the black community in Tupelo in ways that only a twelve- and thirteen-year-old white boy could know it. On Saturday afternoons, he walked past the bustling black businesses. On Saturday nights, he sensed all around him the excitement—music, talking, dancing, drinking, wooing, and fighting. Then, on Sunday mornings, he witnessed the quiet, decorous, best-dressed gatherings of worshippers in the church yards near his home, followed by the rich thick sound of gospel singing welling up and out of the churches and filling the air.
After the Presleys moved to Memphis in 1948, Elvis needed no tutoring in what black culture was about. He did not have to go to Beale Street in Memphis to begin to learn about black people, black life, and black music—blues, gospel, and honky-tonk. Without a doubt, with his almost miraculous ear and passion for music, virtually any music, he drank in those sounds and sights on North Green Street. When he was twelve and thirteen, they became a part of him.
Elvis Presley Page 7