Today is Veterans Day, so here’s a soldier’s love story with a happy ending. It starts in Memphis in 1958 and ends at a wedding two years later. In between, it needed a little push from someone at Elvis Presley’s house in Germany.
Rex Mansfield “was inducted into the Army on the same day as Elvis Presley in March 1958,” right there in Memphis. Suddenly the fellow recruit beside him was the biggest star in the country.
The two of them became real friends. After basic training, Elvis gave Rex a ride home and dropped him off with his parents in Memphis. That’s the kind of thing a buddy does, even when the buddy happens to be Elvis Presley.
A fan who tracks down Elvis history spots has found that exact place, and it’s worth a look because you can see the real corner where Elvis let his Army pal out for a visit home.
The Memphis spot where Elvis dropped Rex off after basic training
Then the Army sent them overseas. In Germany, Elvis lived in a house in the town of Bad Nauheim.
One of the people in that house was Elisabeth Stefaniak. She “was a young German girl in 1958, and was hired to answer Presley’s fan mail.” She lived in the house for 17 months, and she practiced for a whole week before she was allowed to sign things on Elvis’s behalf.
Elvis was good to her. He gave her a car, and then he taught her to drive it. “So it was actually Elvis who drove me to the parking lot and let me practice with him to get my license!” she said years later.
So who decided Rex and Elisabeth belonged together? It wasn’t Elvis.
It was his grandmother, Minnie Mae Presley. Elvis called her “Dodger,” and she had crossed the ocean to keep house for him in Germany. She’d grown close to Elisabeth. And she had a soft spot for Rex too.
“It really showed the love she had for Elizabeth and she always liked me a lot because I always paid attention to her,” Rex said.
So Grandma got to work. She talked each of them up to the other. Rex, she said, “would make some girl a good husband.” And “Elisabeth would make somebody a good wife.”
Elisabeth remembered her fondly: “She was a tough old girl, was always chewing a toothpick!”
Dodger didn’t give up, either. In Rex’s words, “Grandma just kept on insisting and once we did meet, boy I tell you, the sparks just flew!”
The little German town where all of this played out still remembers its famous American soldier, and this short film walks you through Bad Nauheim as it looks today while sharing the town’s own Elvis memories.
Bad Nauheim today, the German town where Elvis lived
Rex and Elisabeth married on June 4, 1960, soon after the Army years. Elisabeth loved telling it this way: “Rex walked me down the aisle to meet Elvis and then a few months later walked me up the aisle to get married!”
In August 2002, the couple sat down with Piers Beagley of the Elvis Information Network at The Peabody Hotel in Memphis. By then they’d been married 42 years. Looking back, Rex said simply that “we never regretted it for one minute.”
When Elisabeth left her job, Elvis told her, “Anytime you want your old job back, you can come back.” But the best thing she carried out of that house in Bad Nauheim was the young soldier Grandma Dodger wouldn’t stop talking about.