In 1960, Elvis came home to Memphis after two years in the Army over in Germany. The whole city wanted a piece of him.
One family got closer than most. The father, Walter, was an Army public relations officer in Memphis, and he brought his wife and daughters out to meet the returning soldier at the fairgrounds.
Elvis shook their hands. He reached down and patted the littlest one, a girl of about five, on the head. Then he moved along to the next group. Just a sweet, ordinary moment on a very busy day.
Except it wasn’t the last time he’d see that little girl.
More than fifteen years went by. Then, on Nov 19, 1976, Elvis invited a local beauty queen up to Graceland. Her name was Terry, and she was the reigning Miss Tennessee. An old friend of Elvis’s, George Klein, had set the whole thing up.
Terry brought her younger sister along for company.
And that younger sister was the same girl from the fairgrounds, all grown up now. This time, Elvis couldn’t take his eyes off her.
Her name was Ginger Alden. She’s the young woman Elvis went on to ask to marry him. The shy child he’d patted on the head as a soldier fresh off the plane had walked right back into his life, and neither of them saw it coming.
There’s real home-movie footage of Elvis with Ginger from the spring of 1977. It’s a rare, relaxed look at him away from the stage, just a man at home with the people he loved.
Home-movie footage of Elvis with Ginger in 1977
It’s hard to watch that and not think of the song that had women all over America swooning twenty years earlier. Here’s Elvis singing it on live television in 1956, back when he was the one everybody couldn’t look away from.
Elvis singing his first great love ballad on live TV
Small world, isn’t it. Two meetings, more than fifteen years apart, and the little girl on the fairgrounds grew up to become one of the most important people in the last chapter of his life.
Elvis met a lot of people. Thousands of hands, thousands of faces, all blurring together on tours and in crowds. But every so often one of those faces came back around. Ginger’s did.
Watch the home movie above and see the two of them together. Then tell us in the comments. Did you know Elvis had met her once before, when she was just a child?