Today is Veterans Day. And 69 years ago today, on Nov 11, 1957, Elvis Presley stepped onto a stage at an Army post in Hawaii and sang for a crowd packed with soldiers and their families.
The post was Schofield Barracks on the island of Oahu, home of the 25th Infantry Division, known as “Tropic Lightning.” The show was held in the Conroy Bowl, the base’s big boxing arena.
The base newspaper, the Hawaii-Lightning News, counted the crowd. “Some 10,000 civilians, military personnel and dependents attended his performance,” it said.
Elvis was 22, and he’d come a long way to get there. He sailed out of Los Angeles on Nov 5, and this old clip catches him heading off on the trip that brought him to the islands.
Elvis leaves Los Angeles for Hawaii on the SS Matsonia, Nov 5, 1957
The day before the Army show, he played two concerts at Honolulu Stadium for nearly 15,000 fans. The Honolulu papers covered those. For Schofield, though, they ran no ads and sent no reporter. They only mentioned it in their reviews of the stadium shows.
So the base paper had the night mostly to itself, and it didn’t hold back.
“The hottest thing to hit this post since the Honest John, Elvis led his audience, majority teen-age girls, into a state of mass hysteria,” it wrote. The Honest John was the Army’s big new rocket at the time.
It was a two-hour show. Hawaiian entertainer Sterling Mossman was on the bill, along with a base vocal group called the Lucky Charms and the base’s own Lightningaires Band. Elvis wore a pearl gray suit with a black shirt and sang “Jailhouse Rock,” “Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Teddy Bear,” “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Love Me.” The paper’s verdict: “His rendition of “Jailhouse Rock” brought the house down.”
Army photographers from the 125th Signal Battalion took a few official pictures that night. But somebody out in the crowd had a camera too.
Their snapshots stayed out of sight for about 55 years. Then, around 2012, they showed up in an eBay auction, and the seller explained where they’d been hiding all that time.
The fan site scottymoore.net, which added the photos on Nov 16, 2012, passed along the seller’s story: “These photos from an eBay auction, according to the seller, were recently found in a Bible purchased at an antique shop in North Georgia.”
A family Bible, a long way from Hawaii. Nobody knows who took the pictures, and the seller’s word is all we have on how they got there.
There’s no known film of the Schofield show itself. The closest thing is this color home movie of Elvis performing at Honolulu Stadium, one day earlier on the very same trip.
Color home movie of Elvis on stage at Honolulu Stadium, Nov 10, 1957
That Army show turned out to be a bigger goodbye than anyone knew. It was Elvis’s last live performance before he went into the Army. It was also the last concert of the 1950s for Elvis with Scotty Moore on guitar, Bill Black on bass and D.J. Fontana on drums, and the last time Bill played a concert with the band.
Elvis sailed home on the SS Lurline on Nov 13. About five weeks later, on Dec 20, 1957, his draft notice arrived while he was home at Graceland for Christmas.
One more Hawaii moment fits a day like today. On Nov 10, after meeting the press, Elvis wrote a note to a 9-year-old girl named Antoinette Mendonca, who was in the hospital. “Please get well, honey. I’ll be thinking of you,” it read in part. The paper said she grinned for the first time in months.