It was a warm Sunday night in Memphis, late July of 1975, and a woman named Mennie Person had stopped outside a car dealership just to look. Mennie was 33, a bank teller, the kind of person who admires a shiny car through the window and then heads home. She’d paused by a gold and white Cadillac sitting out front. It was close to 9:30 at night.
A man walked up behind her. It was Elvis Presley, the biggest singer in the world, the one everybody called the King of Rock and Roll. He had come to Madison Cadillac that night in one of his famous car-buying moods.
He looked at the car she was admiring, and then he said something she never saw coming.
“That one’s mine,” Elvis told her, “but I’ll buy you one.”
Mennie figured he was joking. He wasn’t. He told her to pick whatever she liked, and she chose a gold and white model that ran about $11,500. That was real money in 1975, more than a lot of families made in a whole year. A few days later she told the Los Angeles Times she was “still standing there with my mouth open.”
That alone would’ve been a sweet story. A stranger, a star, a free car, done. But Elvis wasn’t finished, because while they stood there talking he learned one more thing about her.
Her birthday was that coming Tuesday. Just two days away.
So he handed Mennie the keys, wished her a happy birthday, and then turned to one of his aides. He told the man to write her a check too, so she could “buy some clothes to go with the car.” The exact amount of that second check was never made public.
Then Mennie mentioned something. She and her husband, Troy, already had a Cadillac at home. Most people would’ve taken that as a reason to pull back. Elvis just told her to keep the new one for herself and give the old one to her husband.
The whole thing was impulsive and warm and very much the Elvis people remembered. The story ran in newspapers around the country that week. No film crew was there that Sunday night, so there’s no video of the moment. What survives are the photos that ran in 1975, Mennie standing beside the car a stranger had just bought her.
The original 1975 newspaper story, with photos of Mennie and her new Cadillac
Read the original 1975 story on elvis.com.au
Folks told stories like this about Elvis for years. He gave cars to family, to friends, to people he’d known for all of five minutes. This one stuck because of the timing, that birthday sitting two days out, and because Mennie was just an everyday woman who had stopped to look.
Have a look at the photos. You can just about read it on her face.