Before Graceland, there was Audubon Drive.
In 1956 Elvis bought his parents, Gladys and Vernon Presley, a nine-room ranch house at 1034 Audubon Drive in Memphis. It was the family’s first real house, and it came before he bought Graceland in 1957. A New York writer named Sidney Fields called it “the nine-room ranch house he bought for them in one of the most exclusive sections of Memphis.”
Fields wrote for the New York Daily Mirror, and that year he went to Memphis to visit Elvis’s parents at home. His five-part series, “The Real Story Of Elvis Presley,” began on Sept 23, 1956, and other papers reprinted it later that year. We’ve shared a few stories from that same visit lately, including one about the pool. This one is about what kept arriving in the mail.
Gladys was proud of that house, and she made sure Fields knew Elvis had been part of it from the start.
“Elvis picked out everything with me to furnish the house,” Mrs. Presley said proudly, “and he’s always sending new things home.”
It’s easy to imagine. Her son was on the road, getting more famous by the week, and still shopping for his mama’s living room.
If you’d like to see the rooms where all those gifts landed, this tour from 2002 walks through the Audubon Drive house years later, when a man named Mike Freeman owned it.
A walk through Elvis’s Audubon Drive house in 2002
So what did Elvis keep sending?
Lamps.
“He sent so many lamps home I had to store most of them away,” Gladys told Fields.
She didn’t say how many. She didn’t have to. Any mom whose grown son gets one idea and runs with it knows exactly how that went.
And lamps weren’t the only thing piling up. Fields noticed stuffed animals all over the house: “teddy bears, pandas, elephants, monkeys and dogs.” Vernon explained where they came from. When Elvis was a boy, his dad took him to carnivals and taught him how to throw baseballs at wooden bottles to win prizes. Elvis never outgrew it.
“He still does it. Last week he won a toy dump truck. It’s in the living room,” Vernon said.
The living room had plenty else in it too. Fields described a small organ Elvis played by ear, five pictures of Elvis, two framed disc jockey awards and a framed gold record for “Heartbreak Hotel.” This longer tour goes inside and outside the house, so you can picture where the organ, the gold record and that toy dump truck might have sat.
A longer tour inside and outside 1034 Audubon Drive
The Presleys were generous with what they had. Their maid, Alberta, was the first maid they had ever had. When they found out she walked a mile from the bus stop to get to work, they bought her a 1953 Pontiac.
Elvis stayed close even from far away. “He phones us every other night, no matter where he is,” Gladys said. Vernon told Fields that Elvis had mentioned on the phone that “he’s thinking of a big farm.” Within months, he bought Graceland.
That fall, though, Audubon Drive was still home. Somewhere in that house, tucked out of sight, sat the lamps a busy young star kept mailing to his mother.