Gladys Presley once said she never really got to go to school. She was Elvis’s mother, a quiet woman from Mississippi who worked hard her whole life and wanted something better for her only boy. In 1956 she told a New York reporter named Sidney Fields exactly why.
“We didn’t get to go to school. Vernon didn’t graduate either. We can only read and write enough to get by. That’s why I always wanted my son to have an education.”
Vernon was Elvis’s father. An education is what Gladys pushed for, and in 1953 Elvis gave it to her. He graduated from Humes High School in Memphis, the first person in the Presley family ever to finish high school, while they were living on Alabama Street.
Gladys passed away in 1958.
Elvis bought Graceland not long after, and the bedroom that had once been his mother and father’s slowly passed to other family over the years. First to his grandmother Minnie Mae, later to his Aunt Delta. For a long time nobody really went through that room at all.
Angie Marchese changed that. She is the vice president of archives at Graceland, which means she looks after the things Elvis and his family left behind. She told Parade that staff “didn’t really get in there until 93,” meaning the year 1993, when they finally opened the closet in that old bedroom.
“And so we went into the closet and found a wicker trunk,” she said. Inside was a jumble of 1950s odds and ends. There was a shoebox too, and when she opened it, “literally in a shoe box, there were all of these fan photos sent to Gladys,” most of them mailed to her from Texas.
It was what sat underneath all those photos that stopped her.
You can hear Gladys and Vernon themselves from that same year, 1956, in an old radio interview a fan has saved online.
Gladys and Vernon Presley talking to a radio station in 1956
That clip is a different conversation, and the trunk never comes up in it. For the trunk, you have to go back to 1993 and to what Marchese lifted out from the very bottom.
Under all those fan photos was Elvis’s high school graduation program and the tassel from his cap. Gladys had quietly saved them from that 1953 day at Humes, and there they had stayed.
“It was in the bottom of that that I found his graduation program and tassel,” Marchese said, “because that was a mom saving a memorable moment in her son’s life. He’s the first Presley to graduate high school, you know?”
The same trunk held one more sweet find, a little photo-booth strip of Elvis at about 15, grinning at the camera.
Marchese once put into plain words why these small things mean so much to people. “I guess if you can’t get to Elvis, you get to Mom,” she said. Read the full story of what else Gladys kept all those years.