When Elvis first moved his family into Graceland, the big white mansion was only half of the picture. The other half was a working farm.
His mama Gladys kept chickens out back. Vernon, his dad, raised hogs and cured his own pork in the old pump house. Elvis even had a pet turkey named Bowtie. For a country family who grew up with next to nothing, having their own animals on the grounds of a mansion felt just right.
Gladys loved those chickens. So one day Elvis, Vernon and their good friend Lamar Fike decided to go get her some more. They drove out to Germantown, just outside Memphis, to buy chickens and ducks.
Here’s the part that still makes people laugh. They didn’t take a pickup truck. They took a limousine.
You can probably guess who got stuck riding in the back with the birds.
Home movie footage of Vernon and Gladys at Graceland in 1957
There’s no camera footage of that wild drive, but this rare home movie shows Vernon and Gladys at Graceland in 1957, the same farm years when the chicken run happened. Watch how at home they look out on that big front lawn.
Lamar Fike was the one who climbed in back with the chickens and ducks. The plan was simple. He would try to keep them calm for the ride home.
The birds had other ideas.
They got loose. They flapped and flew all around the inside of that limo, and poor Lamar fought to control them the whole way back while they made a terrible mess. By the time the car pulled up to Graceland, the inside was a disaster.
The staff cleaned it. They fumigated it top to bottom. But some things you just can’t scrub out. The limo was never the same after that day, and it was eventually replaced.
It’s a small story, but it tells you so much about the Presleys. Elvis could have sent someone else to run that errand. Instead he climbed in the car with his dad and his buddy and went to fetch his mother’s chickens himself, in the fanciest ride he owned.
That was Elvis. The biggest star in the world, still a Tupelo country boy at heart, still doing little things to make his mama smile.
Graceland was grand and famous. But in those early years it smelled a little like a barnyard, and nobody there seemed to mind one bit.