Veterans Day is next Wednesday, and it’s a good time to remember that Elvis Presley once wore the uniform too.
He was drafted into the US Army in 1958. On Oct 1 of that year, at 23, he walked off a troop ship in Bremerhaven, West Germany. He’d be stationed there for 17 months.
His mother had passed away that August.
But Elvis didn’t make the trip on his own. His father, Vernon, who was 42, came over to be near him. And so did someone you might not expect.
His grandmother.
Minnie Mae Presley was Vernon’s mother, and she was 68 years old when she crossed the ocean to look after her grandson. Elvis had a pet name for her: he called her “Dodger.”
The Army allowed it. Soldiers whose family members lived nearby could live off post with them. So after a short stay at the Hotel Grunewald, the Presleys rented a house in the town of Bad Nauheim. It was a three-story white stucco place at Goethestrasse 14.
Grandma ran the kitchen.
Every workday, Elvis got up at 5:30 in the morning. Minnie Mae would have his usual breakfast ready. That meant bacon fried until it was very well done and crisp, eggs fried hard, peaches and Southern biscuits with butter and jam. Then Elvis drove to the base by 6:30.
It’s easy to see her at the stove before sunrise, cooking the same Southern breakfast she’d have made back home, in a kitchen thousands of miles away.
She also had some help. The landlady, Frau Pieper, stayed on in the attic bedroom of the house and pitched in with the housekeeping alongside Grandma.
The house is still there today, and this video takes you to it and tells the story of the family who lived there.
The house in Bad Nauheim where Elvis lived with his dad and grandmother
The fans found the house, of course. A sign out front gave them autograph hours, and Elvis would come out from 7:30 to 8 in the evening to meet them.
Elvis’s friend Lamar Fike went to Germany with him, and he once described how Elvis handled life over there. “Elvis always kept his own world with him; he kept his own bubble,” Lamar said.
A big part of that bubble was family. One history of his Army years says having his family close by cheered him up immensely.
Think about what it took for Minnie Mae. She was nearly 70, and she packed up and moved across an ocean so her grandson would have a home-cooked breakfast and a familiar face at the table. Plenty of grandmothers reading this would do the same thing in a heartbeat.
Next week, as the country honors everyone who has served, it’s worth tipping a hat to the folks back home who looked after them, too. For one young soldier in 1958, that was his grandma.