Margaret Matson was 23 in 1956 and taught English at Bald Knob High School in Arkansas. She wasn’t looking for an adventure that summer. A former student of hers had asked a favor.
The girl was president of the local Elvis fan club, and she and a couple of friends wanted to see Elvis Presley perform in Memphis. They were only 15 or 16. They needed grown-ups to go along. So Matson and another female teacher agreed to chaperone.
Years later Matson told the story to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, for a 2015 piece that ran around what would have been Elvis’s 80th birthday.
The group got to Memphis early. With time to spare, they drove to Elvis’s home at 1034 Audubon Drive, the first house he had bought for his parents, Vernon and Gladys, that same year. The plan was simple. Look at the outside, take a picture or two and leave.
This old home movie of the Audubon Drive house in 1956 lets you see the street and the house the way those girls would have found it.
A 1956 home movie at Elvis’s Audubon Drive house
While they stood out front, a car pulled up. It was Vernon and Gladys, in the pink Cadillac Elvis had bought his mother.
Gladys didn’t shoo anybody away. She let the girls take pictures of the house. Then she invited the whole group inside.
Elvis was in the den.
Gladys was the warm woman who opened that door, and you can hear her for yourself in this 1956 interview, shared by Kay Wheeler, who ran an early Elvis fan club.
Gladys Presley in her own voice in 1956
Inside, Elvis played host. He asked the girls, “Would you like to listen to some records?” They answered, “Just yours.” He shot back, “Well, those are the only ones I’d play.” He was joking, of course.
He talked with them for a couple of hours. At some point the two teachers figured they’d taken up enough of his day, and they politely got up to go.
Elvis stopped them. “Don’t go; I have time,” he said.
Then he had his picture taken with each of the girls. That would have been plenty for any fan-club president. But Elvis turned to the two chaperones and asked them for something too.
“Can’t I have my picture taken with you two also?”
So the teachers got their photo with Elvis Presley. He posed with both of them and hugged them goodbye.
Matson never forgot how he treated them. “He was very kind to us and seemed happy to have someone to visit with and not have any people screaming or yelling at him,” she said.
That photo stayed with her. Nearly 60 years later, when the paper wrote her story, she still had it.
The house on Audubon Drive is still standing, and this short look at it today walks through the 1956 story of the place where it all happened.
Elvis’s 1956 Memphis home as it looks today
It’s easy to forget how young Elvis was that year, and how fast his life was changing. On one quiet afternoon, though, a few teenagers from Arkansas and their two teachers found him at home, in no hurry at all, asking if he could have a picture with them.