Elvis Presley could buy his little girl almost anything. The gift she remembered best didn’t cost much at all. It was a night at an amusement park with the whole place to themselves.
There was a park in Memphis called Libertyland, not far from where Elvis grew up. It had a grand old wooden roller coaster, built back in 1912, that he adored. Most nights the ride was packed with strangers. Elvis didn’t want strangers. So he’d rent out the entire park after dark and ride that coaster over and over with nobody watching.
When his daughter was old enough, she rode right beside him.
Lisa Marie Presley was Elvis’s only child, born in 1968. For most of her life she kept those memories to herself. Near the end she started writing a book about her dad, and her own daughter, the actress Riley Keough, finished it and brought it out in 2024.
In it, Lisa Marie set down what those nights felt like.
“Sometimes my dad would take me to an amusement park in Memphis called Libertyland, and he would close it down for me and all the entourage and their families and friends. He and I would ride on the roller coasters. I loved it.”
The coaster they loved had a funny name. The Zippin Pippin. For years it was the star ride at Libertyland, and Elvis is the reason a lot of folks ever heard of it.
Then the park fell on hard times. Libertyland shut its gates for good in 2005, and it looked like the old ride might be gone right along with it.
The Zippin Pippin didn’t end up in a scrapyard though.
A city nearly 700 miles north wanted it. Green Bay, Wisconsin, the little Wisconsin football town, spent $3.8 million to buy the coaster and rebuild it piece by piece at its own Bay Beach Amusement Park. It opened there in 2011, and by 2013 more than a million people had climbed aboard.
This is the city’s own look back at how the ride made that long trip up from Memphis.
How Elvis’s favorite coaster moved from Memphis to Green Bay
So the ride Elvis rented a whole park to enjoy is still out there, still clattering up that first hill for anyone who buys a ticket. It’s rebuilt, not the exact same wood, but it runs the same track he knew.
If you want to feel what he and Lisa Marie felt, somebody strapped a camera on for the full ride.
A front-seat ride on the Zippin Pippin today
Both Elvis and Lisa Marie have passed away now. But the coaster they rode together is still running in Green Bay, and anyone can walk up, buy a ticket and take the same ride they did.