Elvis Left Basic Training To Sit Beside His Mother — Two Days Later She DIED D

Her name was Gladys Love Presley and she died before dawn on the 14th of August, 1958 in a hospital bed in Memphis, Tennessee. She was 46 years old, 68 years ago tonight. Her son was 23 and he was a private in the United States Army and he had been given emergency leave two days earlier to come home and sit beside her.

He got there in time. That is the part most people have forgotten. He got there in time and it did not help. There is a version of this story that gets repeated a great deal and in that version the army refused to let him come and he arrived too late and that is where the grief comes from. It is not true. The army let him go.

He came. He sat in that room with her for two days and then she died anyway in the small hours of a Thursday morning and he buried her and 11 days later he went back to Texas and finished being a soldier. To understand what that morning did to him you have to understand who she was because she was not a supporting character in his life. She was the center of it.

Gladys Love Smith was born in 1912 in Pontotoc County, Mississippi into a sharecropping family which in that place and in that year meant working land that belonged to somebody else and hoping the year came out even. Most years it did not come out even. She married Vernon Presley in June of 1933. She was 21 years old. He was 17.

They borrowed the $3 they needed for the marriage license. They moved into a two-room house in East Tupelo that Vernon had put up with help from his father and his brother and that house is still standing today and you can walk from the front door through the whole of it in about 15 seconds. On the 8th of January, 1935, in that house, she gave birth to twins.

Jesse Garon came first at around 4:00 in the morning and he was born dead. Elvis Aaron came 35 minutes later and he lived. Jesse was buried the next day in an unmarked grave at Priceville Cemetery a few miles away. She never had another child. From that morning forward, she had exactly one and she had already learned what it felt like to lose one.

In 1938, Vernon Presley was convicted of altering a check. The accounts differ on the amount, but it was small. A few dollars from the sale of a hog changed into a larger figure. For that, he was sent to Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Gladys was left with a three-year-old boy and no income at all. They lost the house they were living in.

She and the child moved in with relatives and she went to work. She worked. That is the plainest sentence in this whole story and it is also the most important one. She ran a sewing machine in a garment factory in Tupelo. Later, in Memphis, she worked in a curtain factory and then as a nurse’s aide at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

She came home from those shifts and cooked and cleaned and kept a boy fed and clothed through years when a great many families in that part of the country simply could not manage it. And she kept him close, uncomfortably close by the standards of every other family on that street.

She walked him to school and she walked him home from school well past the age when most boys stop letting their mothers do that. They had private words for ordinary things, a small private language between the two of them. People who knew them in Tupelo and later in Memphis all described the same thing in the same slightly bewildered tone.

In 1948, the family left Tupelo for Memphis in a borrowed truck with everything they owned stacked in the back of it. They lived in public housing at Lauderdale Courts. He went to Humes High School where nobody expected him to become anything in particular. He was quiet. He was peculiar about his clothes and his hair in a way that got him noticed and not admired.

And more than anything else he was his mother’s son. Then in 1954 he walked into a small recording studio on Union Avenue and everything changed faster than anyone in that family was equipped to understand. Within 2 years he was the most famous young man in the country. Within three he had bought his mother a house with white columns on a hill on Highway 51 South.

It cost $102,500. She had been born in a sharecropper’s cabin. And here is the detail that everybody in Memphis knew about that house. By many accounts Gladys Presley kept chickens on the grounds of Graceland. She hung her wash out on a line behind it. She had been poor for 45 years and being suddenly enormously not poor did not take with her.

And her son never once made her feel foolish about any of it. He let her keep the chickens. That tells you a great deal about both of them. Then came the draft. The notice arrived at Graceland just before Christmas of 1957. And on the 24th of March 1958 he was inducted. And the whole country watched an army barber cut off his hair in Arkansas.

That was yesterday’s story on this channel. What yesterday’s story did not include is what all of it did to the woman standing at the gate of Graceland that morning watching her only living child climb onto a bus. We do not know what she thought and I am not going to put words in her mouth.

But we know she had already lost one son on the morning she got this one. We know that the people around that family said afterward that she was frightened in a way that did not lift once he was gone. And we know her health was not good before he left and that it did not improve in the months after he did because there was a regulation and the regulation said that a soldier supporting dependents could live off post.

So after basic training Elvis rented a house in Killeen, Texas close to Fort Hood and Gladys and Vernon and his grandmother drove down from Memphis to move into it. She wanted to be near him. She got a few months of being near him in a rented house in a small Texas town in the middle of a Texas summer. She got sicker there.

The people who have looked most carefully at that summer Peter Guralnick above all of them describe a woman whose health had been failing for a long while and who was not taking care of herself. She was drinking. She was taking the kind of diet pills that doctors in the 1950s handed out freely and cheerfully without much thought at all about what those pills did to a body over years.

By the beginning of August, she was too ill to stay. On the 8th of August, she and Vernon boarded a train back to Memphis because she wanted to see her own doctor in her own city. She was weak enough by then that she had to be helped aboard. The next day, she was admitted to Methodist Hospital in Memphis. The diagnosis was acute hepatitis.

Her liver was failing and it had been failing for some time. Her son was 500 miles away in Texas in uniform in the middle of a training cycle. He applied for emergency leave. There is a version of what happened next that still circulates in which the army coldly refused him and it is wrong.

What actually happened is that the request went up the chain of command and there was a delay and by several accounts, he told his officers he would go without permission if he had to. Then the leave came through. He flew into Memphis on the 12th of August and went straight to the hospital. He sat with her. Vernon had been sleeping on a cot in her room since the day she was admitted and now there were two of them in there.

The husband and the son in a hospital room in Memphis in August taking turns in the chair while she slept and woke and slept again and the fans turned in the windows. For two days that is what the most famous young man in America did with his time. He did not perform. He gave no interviews. Reporters stood outside the hospital because by then reporters stood outside of everywhere he was and he did not go out to speak to them once.

He went back and forth between that hospital room and the house on the hill that his mother had lived in for exactly 17 months. On the night of the 13th, he went home to Graceland to sleep. Vernon stayed at the hospital and in the small hours of the 14th of August, 1958 Gladys Presley had a heart attack in that bed. Vernon telephoned the house.

Her son came as fast as a car could carry him across Memphis in the dark and he got into the room and she was not in it anymore. That is how it happened. The funeral was held the following afternoon. He asked for the Blackwood Brothers the gospel quartet he had grown up listening to on the radio and in church halls and they came and they sang for her.

Thousands of people stood outside the funeral home in the August heat. Photographers climbed onto the roofs of cars for a better angle. Whatever privacy an ordinary family is given on the worst day of its life, that family was given none of it. Everyone who was there described the same thing afterward, and not one of them enjoyed describing it.

He was inconsolable. He was not composed, he was not brave about it, and he made no attempt whatsoever to appear to be either in front of anyone for hours. He was 23 years old, and the person who had been the fixed point of his entire life since the morning he was born alive was in a box in front of him.

And then, 11 days later, he went back to Fort Hood because that is what a private in the United States Army does, whatever has happened to him. He finished his training. In September, he sailed for Germany, and he served the full 2 years there. And by every account of every man who served alongside him, he never once asked anybody for anything on the basis of what had happened to his family that August.

He never really put it down again. Friends said for the rest of his life that he talked about her constantly, that he kept her things exactly where she had left them, that the middle of August came around every year and he was not himself inside it. He had bought her a pink Cadillac in 1955 that she never learned to drive. It stayed with the family.

It is still at Graceland today and that is tomorrow’s story. She was buried at Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis on the 15th of August of 1958 and she stayed there for 19 years. Then in 1977 her son died in the house she had kept chickens behind and there were security problems at the cemetery afterward and both of them were brought home to Graceland to the meditation garden where the two of them are lying now a few steps from the back door.

So, tonight the 14th of August is the anniversary. 68 years exactly. And her grave is about 30 steps from the back door of the house that he bought for her which is not where either of them could possibly have expected to end up when they were living in two rooms in East Tupelo.

If you have ever lost your own mother that may be the only part of this entire story that sounds anything like mercy. Here is what I keep coming back to. Everything he became, he became in some large part to buy that woman a house. That was the shape of his ambition before there was any money anywhere near it. Not fame for its own sake, not a legend, not the things that came later and cost him so much.

A house for his mother with a yard around it and no landlord and enough left over that she never had to sit at a sewing machine again. And he got it done. That is the strange and difficult part of it. He actually got it done. He bought her the house on the hill in March of 1957 and she lived in it for 17 months and then she was gone at 46 years old.

He had 19 more years to live and he lived every one of them without her. And there are people who knew him well who believed he never truly recovered from it. There is no tidy lesson in that and I am not going to hand you one tonight. But if your mother is still alive this evening and you have been meaning to call her the telephone is right there where you left it.

That is not a sentimental thing to say on the 14th of August. Given everything you have just heard it may be the only genuinely useful thing anybody has ever taken out of this particular story. If this story meant something to you tonight please take a moment to subscribe and tap that thumbs up. And in the comments do something for us. Tell us your mother’s name.

Just her name and where she was from. We will read every single one of them and so will everybody else who comes to this video today. Ring that notification bell so you never miss a story from 60’s America Rewind. God bless your mother and God bless each and every one of you.