In 1960, not long after Elvis Presley came home from the Army, three little boys arrived at Graceland to live.
Billy Stanley was 7. His brother Ricky was 6, and David, the youngest, was about 4. Their mother, Dee, married Elvis’s father, Vernon, that same year. And just like that, a man who grew up without a brother had three of them running around his house.
Billy wrote about that first day decades later in his 2022 book, “The Faith of Elvis: A Story Only a Brother Can Tell.” He and David also talked about it with Memphis TV station WREG, and Billy told the story again to Fox News Digital.
The boys didn’t have to wait long to meet their famous new brother. Billy told WREG, “Everybody parted like the sea and there was Elvis.”
What happened next is the moment Billy put right at the start of his book.
“Moments after we arrived at Graceland, the man the world knew as “the King” scooped me and my brothers up in his arms and exclaimed, “Daddy, I always wanted a little brother. Now I’ve got three!””
“These were some of the first words I ever heard Elvis speak,” Billy wrote.
David, the little one, remembered that welcome too. “He looked over at me and he picked me up and he gave me a hug and he welcomed me into his family.”
Elvis didn’t pass the boys off to someone else and go about his evening. Billy told Fox News Digital that Elvis talked with them the rest of the night. Then he tucked them into bed himself.
But while three worn-out boys slept in a strange new house, Elvis was still busy.
The next morning, the boys went out to the backyard.
“We go out to the backyard and there are three of every kind of toy you could think of,” Billy told Fox News Digital.
Three of everything, one for each boy, on their very first morning.
So how does a person pull that off overnight? Billy had the answer. “He had a store open up after we went to bed.”
Billy summed up the feeling for WREG in one line. “He was like Santa Claus in July.”
It’s one thing to read these memories and another to hear the brothers tell them. Billy and David sat down with WREG News Channel 3 in Memphis to talk about Elvis and what it was like growing up at Graceland.
Billy and David Stanley remember Elvis and life at Graceland
There’s one more line from Billy’s book that says a lot about how Elvis saw those three boys from the very start.
“He would never call us stepbrothers.”
To Elvis they were his brothers, plain and simple. He’d said so the minute they walked in the door, with all three of them in his arms.
Billy was 7 when he heard those first words. He was still telling the story more than 60 years later.