Long before anyone outside Memphis knew his name, Elvis Presley was a teenager whose family had very little. They lived at 462 Alabama Avenue.
Upstairs lived Rabbi Alfred Fruchter and his wife, Jeannette.
Alfred had come to Memphis in the late 1940s as the first principal of the Memphis Hebrew Academy, now the Margolin Hebrew Academy. The building the two families shared is gone now. But the Fruchter family has held on to the stories, and their son Harold still tells them.
The families weren’t just neighbors. They looked out for each other.
The Fruchters’ faith didn’t allow them to do certain chores on the Sabbath. So every week a polite teenage boy from downstairs came up to turn on the lights and the gas stove for them.
That boy was Elvis, and he had his own way of greeting the man of the house. He called him “Sir Rabbi.”
Gladys Presley, Elvis’s mother, often came up to visit Jeannette in the afternoons after work. When the Presleys were short of money, the Fruchters helped with the electric and water bills.
There’s a sweet family story about Harold, too. When he was born in July 1952, family lore says Elvis asked if he could carry the newborn upstairs. And because the two families shared an address, Harold’s birth certificate lists the same one Elvis had.
“Our addresses were the same, which means my birth certificate has Elvis’s address on it, which is pretty cool,” Harold said.
When Elvis graduated from Humes High in 1953, Jeannette gave him a grown-up present: his first pair of cufflinks, black onyx. If you’ve never seen the school that teenage Elvis attended, this short clip gives you a good look at Humes High.
A look at Humes High, the school Elvis graduated from
Then came summer 1954. Elvis had his first single out, and it should have been the most exciting moment of his young life.
There was one problem. The Presleys couldn’t afford a record player. Elvis couldn’t even listen to his own record at home.
So he went upstairs and asked the Fruchters if he could borrow theirs.
Harold tells the story the way his mother told it. Jeannette didn’t just say yes. “Elvis, you’re in luck,” she said. “We’re going away for the whole summer, so you can have it.”
The whole summer. The boy who’d been flipping on their lights every Sabbath got their record player for months, just as his own voice was finally on a record.
The family’s verdict on that voice was honest. “They thought he had a nice voice, but they didn’t think it was exceptional,” said Judy Fruchter, the rabbi’s daughter.
This is the record he wanted so badly to play, “That’s All Right,” his first single for Sun Records. Give it a listen and you’ll see why a 19-year-old couldn’t wait.
Elvis’s first single, “That’s All Right”
The Fruchters left Memphis in 1955. But they never forgot the boy downstairs.
Jeannette remembered him, as the Forward described it, as “the nicest boy you could ever hope to meet.”
Harold tells the whole story himself in a radio piece from Vox Tablet. You can listen to it on Tablet’s website, and hearing it from the boy whose birth certificate shares Elvis’s address makes it even better.