Every morning, Gary Pepper went through the Memphis newspapers with a pair of scissors.
That was his business, and he’d built it himself. Sterling Gary Pepper Jr. had cerebral palsy, and he supported himself by cutting out local newspaper articles that mentioned local businesses. The companies paid him for the clippings.
When you read that many papers, you start to notice things. Before long Gary was noticing stories about a new singer in town named Presley.
Then he read something else. Elvis’s mother, Gladys Presley, had started a scrapbook about her son.
Her boy was turning up in the papers more and more. Of course a mother would want to save every word.
Gary had the papers and the scissors. So he began supplying Mrs. Presley with clippings about Elvis.
If you’ve ever kept a scrapbook for your own kids, you know how hard it is to catch every little write-up. Gladys suddenly had someone doing that for her, and doing it well.
The Presleys noticed. According to Elvis Australia, the fan site that has pieced together Gary’s story, the whole family became close to him.
And Elvis didn’t stop at a thank-you.
He turned Gary’s love for his music into a real job. Gary became president of the Elvis Tankers, a fan club, and Elvis paid him for running it. A 1960 photo shows Gary in a crowd, with a caption naming him as the “head of the Elvis Tankers fan club.”
Elvis gave him a Polaroid camera, too. Gary used it to take some early photos.
Then Elvis went further than most people would ever think to go for a fan. He bought a house on Dolan Drive for Gary, his mother and his nurse to live in.
He also gave Gary’s father a job. Sterling Pepper went to work as a gate guard at Graceland, Elvis’s home in Memphis.
Gary’s mother often took him to the movies and to the gates of Graceland. You can only guess how those trips felt, with his own dad working right there at the gate.
It all traced back to a mother’s scrapbook and a young man who knew how to find a story in the paper.
A fan put together this short tribute to Elvis and Gary, and it’s a nice way to put a face to the man who kept Gladys’s scrapbook full.
A fan’s tribute to Elvis and his friend Gary Pepper
Gary passed away in 1980. But his story came back into the news nearly 30 years later.
In October 2009, about 200 items from his collection were auctioned at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers in Chicago. One was a lock of Elvis’s hair believed to have been cut when Elvis went into the Army in 1958. It sold for $15,000. An Elvis shirt went for $52,000.
Those were big numbers. Still, the line people remembered from that auction came from Leslie Hindman herself, who ran the sale.
She called Gary “one of Elvis’s best friends.”