On the morning of 7 March 1960, a train pulled into Union Station in Memphis in the middle of a snowstorm. Around 200 people were waiting on the platform in the cold to see who got off. The man they were waiting for had been gone for two years, and as the train slowed he muttered something almost to himself that a reporter caught: “I’ve been gone a long time. A long time.” Elvis Presley was home from the Army. And waiting for him inside Graceland was a Christmas tree from 1957 that nobody had taken down.
He had been drafted in December 1957, just before Christmas. He put up the tree, celebrated the holiday at his new house, and then left for the Army. The tree stayed exactly where it was for over two years, through two more Christmases he was not there for. When he finally came home and held his first press conference that afternoon, he did it in the two-room office building behind the mansion — and the 1957 tree was still standing in there.
Elvis Presley Interview at Graceland 1960
He was visibly on edge, and he did not hide it. Asked how he felt, he told a reporter from the Press-Scimitar simply: “If I act nervous, it’s because I am.” When somebody asked what he had missed most about Memphis, his answer was three words long. “Everything. I mean that — everything.”
The nerves were about more than coming home. Elvis had spent two years genuinely terrified that his career was finished. Rock and roll moved fast in the 1950s, and two years was long enough for the world to find somebody else. He had said so out loud while stationed in Germany: “I have no way of telling if my fame is fading. You just don’t know. I hope the folks back home haven’t forgotten me.”
Elvis Home From The Army
And he had earned the right to be nervous, because he had done the service properly. The Army had offered him Special Services — a comfortable posting where famous men entertained the troops and slept in decent beds. He turned it down. He served as an ordinary soldier in an armored division, went out on winter training exercises in the field, and by his own account got no special treatment at all. He came home a sergeant.
There is a small moment from that morning at the station that says everything about him. Before he did anything else, Elvis spotted a young man in the crowd holding a sign reading “Welcome Home, Elvis, The Tankers.” His name was Gary Pepper; he was 27; he had cerebral palsy, and he ran a fan club for Elvis’s tank corps. Elvis asked one of the Colonel’s men to bring him over so he could talk to him personally.
Then he got straight back to work, and fast. Within two weeks he was in a Nashville studio recording the album Elvis Is Back! Within three weeks he was in Miami taping a television special with Frank Sinatra — the man who had publicly called rock and roll ugly and vicious three years earlier.
He needn’t have worried about being forgotten. But that afternoon, standing in a small office behind his own house next to a Christmas tree from a holiday he had missed, he did not know that yet.