Mildred Mayer had just planted some young birch trees in her front yard.
Then her famous new neighbor walked across the road to ask her about them.
The street was Audubon Drive, and the young man was Elvis Presley. On May 11, 1956, Elvis and his parents, Vernon and Gladys, moved into the house at 1034 Audubon Drive along with his grandmother Minnie Mae. It was the first house Elvis ever bought, and they lived there about 13 months before moving to Graceland in 1957.
The best stories about those months come from the people who lived next door and across the street, and a Rhodes College history project later gathered them up.
Rhodes College owns the house today and restored it to its 1956 look, and this short film from the college shows you the place before you hear what happened out front.
A look back at the Audubon Drive house and its story
This was a street full of kids. One former neighbor, Dan Handwerker, said there were 64 children living on it in the 1950s.
Elvis fit right in. He brought his buddies over to play touch football with the neighborhood boys in the front yards, and he played quarterback. Bill Metz, who lived next door and was 12 at the time, remembers handing the ball off to him. He’d stop the game to sign autographs for fans.
He gave the kids motorcycle rides and handed out teddy bears “out of his bedroom.” Gladys let some of the children swim in the new pool after she’d fed them peanut butter sandwiches.
This fan video, filmed outside the house, tells the story of one neighbor who swam in that pool.
A fan visit to the house and a neighbor’s pool story
Gladys was just as friendly as her son. She grew corn, tomatoes and purple hull peas out back, hung her wash on the line and visited with the women on the street. Once she told Mildred Mayer she couldn’t believe she’d just spent money on curtains. “Ain’t Sears high?”
Then came the day Elvis went over to see Mildred. According to the Rhodes College history of the house, it happened while he lived there (1956 to 1957). He walked across the street and asked Mildred what kind of saplings she’d just planted. The birch trees looked so nice, he said. He’d been wanting to put trees in his own front yard. Would she mind if he bought the same kind?
“Sure, Elvis, you can do what you want,” she told him.
Nobody on the street was ready for what came next.
The very next day, cranes rolled up to the Presleys’ house and set full-size trees into the front yard.
The project put it best. “The neighborhood, needless to say, was shocked at the sudden appearance of the Presley’s forest.”
You can walk through the rooms the family lived in during those months in this tour of the restored house.
Inside the restored house on Audubon Drive
Elvis told Memphis Press-Scimitar reporter Bob Johnson in 1956, “I want the folks back home to think right of me. Just because I managed to do a little something, I don’t want anyone back home to think I got the big head.”
Photographer Alfred Wertheimer took many photos of Elvis in that front yard on July 4, 1956, and this CBS News feature is a chance to see the young man the neighbors knew through his camera.
A photographer remembers his 1956 pictures of Elvis
The neighbors on Audubon Drive described the Presleys again and again as “nice, likable people.” Years later, they loved telling people, “Yes, we knew him, and he lived on our street!”
They also had a pretty good story about the trees.