Every mom has her version of it. The fridge door covered in report cards, or the hallway lined with school pictures from every grade.
Gladys Presley had one too. Hers just happened to be for a young man named Elvis Presley.
In 1956 Elvis bought his very first house, at 1034 Audubon Drive in Memphis. It was for his mom and dad, Gladys and Vernon Presley. His grandmother Minnie Mae came along too. The family moved in on May 11, 1956.
A lot happened in that house. It’s where Elvis first tried on his famous gold lamé suit, right “in front of 1034’s living room fireplace,” as writer Alice Fugate put it in “Where Elvis Became Elvis,” her 2016 history of the house for Rhodes College.
Gladys made the place a home. She visited with the neighbors, calling back and forth with Mrs. Jemison and having coffee with Mrs. Mayer. She liked to show them her garden.
Then she turned to the living room.
Gladys bought musical figurines for the living room wall. After that she set up a display of her son’s things. Fugate wrote: “Although his portrait and high school diploma were displayed, among other things, one neighbor remembers his records being stacked against a wall.”
That diploma mattered. Elvis finished Humes High in 1953 as the first Presley to graduate from high school, which is why it meant so much to Gladys.
So what did Elvis think of his mom’s handiwork?
He gave the room a name of his own. Drawing on Peter Guralnick’s Elvis biography “Last Train to Memphis,” Fugate wrote: “Gladys bought some musical figurines for the living room wall and set up what Elvis called ‘a museum of me.'”
A museum of me.
It sounds like the kind of thing a son says with a little grin. And it tells you plenty about Gladys. The whole country was starting to know her boy, but she wanted him right there on her own living room wall too.
Elvis didn’t get to enjoy the museum for long. He lived on Audubon Drive for about 13 months. By then the fans had gotten so heavy that privacy was impossible, and in May 1957 the family moved to Graceland.
The house is in good hands now. Today it belongs to Rhodes College and its Mike Curb Institute for Music, a gift from Mike and Linda Curb. The college’s own channel posted a film called “Return to Audubon,” and it’s a chance to see the house where Gladys built her little museum.
A return visit to Elvis’s house on Audubon Drive
There’s one more Gladys story from Audubon Drive worth sharing, and it comes from her neighbor Mildred Mayer.
After Gladys bought new curtains for the house, she told Mildred she couldn’t believe what she’d just spent. Her words, as Mildred remembered them: “Ain’t Sears high?”
Her son had just bought the house, and Gladys was still keeping an eye on the price tags.
That’s how Mildred told it, anyway.