Long before Graceland, Elvis Presley’s birthday parties were small enough to fit around one table in a little house in East Tupelo, Mississippi.
Magdalene Morgan was at that table. She was Elvis’s childhood sweetheart from about the fifth grade until the Presleys moved to Memphis. They went to school together at Lawhon, and they sat in the same little Assembly of God church, where Magdalene was the church pianist at just 8 or 9 years old.
Her mother was Gladys Presley’s best friend. So the two families were close, and Magdalene and her mom were over at the Presley home a lot.
Years later she shared her memories with writer Bill E. Burk for his book “Early Elvis: The Tupelo Years.” She also sat down on camera to talk about the boy she knew, and it’s worth hearing her in her own voice.
Magdalene Morgan looks back on the young Elvis she knew
“He was just my ideal guy,” she said. “He was very pleasant, very polite.”
She went to “a couple of birthday parties for Elvis in his home,” and they weren’t big affairs.
“They were at that little house on Old Saltillo Road. There would be Elvis and his family; me and my family.”
Supper came first: beans, potatoes and meat. Then the birthday cake, and Gladys handled that herself.
“Gladys made the cake and the frosting. And sometimes she made the ice cream in one of those old-time ice cream freezers. We had to take turns cranking.”
If you grew up with a hand-crank freezer on the back porch, you know exactly how long that took.
So what did the birthday boy get?
Usually a shirt. According to Burk’s book, “For birthday gifts, Elvis would receive a shirt, sometimes a hand-made one made out of flour sack material.”
Back then, flour and feed came in printed cotton sacks, and plenty of country mothers sewed them into shirts and dresses. That handmade shirt was most likely sewn by Gladys herself.
“Gladys was very good at sewing. She worked in a sewing factory,” Magdalene remembered. “He’d wind up getting the shirt, maybe a bar of candy. Those were the good ol’ times, something we will always remember.”
And the candy? She even remembered his favorite. “One of his favorite candies back then was Milky Way.”
Gladys is the quiet hero of this story, and Graceland’s own channel takes a close look at her closet, a nice way to get to know the woman who was so handy with a needle.
A look inside Gladys Presley’s closet at Graceland
Those shirts showed up at school too. Magdalene said Elvis “mostly wore overalls or coveralls; at times a flour sack shirt. He did have a few better shirts. He was always neat and clean.”
Neat and pressed, every day. That tells you a lot about the mother looking after him.
East Tupelo still has the places where all of this happened, and this travel show walks through Elvis’s birthplace and the neighborhood as it looks today.
Elvis’s birthplace and East Tupelo today
Magdalene’s stories give us a rare peek at Elvis before anyone outside Tupelo knew his name. Just a polite boy at a small table, a cake his mother made and a turn at the ice cream crank.
If your own mother or grandmother ever turned a flour sack into something to wear, you’ll understand why Magdalene remembered those little parties so fondly.