Nancy Rooks spent years inside Graceland. She was Elvis Presley’s cook and maid, and she later wrote a memoir about it called “Inside Graceland: Elvis’ Maid Remembers,” with Jim Cox.
She told interviewer Gary James how the job was explained when she started. “They just told me, whatever need to be done, do it!” And she knew the exact date: “That was May 9th 1967.”
But that wasn’t the first time Nancy crossed paths with Elvis. Not even close.
Before Graceland, Nancy lived in North Memphis. “I lived there on Alabama Street,” she said. Her street was near Humes High School, where a skinny boy named Elvis Presley went to school. She’d heard of him because he went to Humes, but she had never put a face to the name.
That changed one evening on a walk to the store.
Elvis was a teenager at Humes High then, years away from fame. Before we get to that evening, take a few minutes with Bob Rice, who was Elvis’s classmate at Humes, to get to know the teenage boy Nancy was about to run into.
A Humes High classmate of Elvis sits down to talk about him
Here’s how Nancy told it to Gary James, in her own words.
“I was goin’ to the store one evening and this little ol’ boy was standing side of the street and he was bare-feeted”
That was just the start. “and he had some overalls on, one strap was fastened, the other one wasn’t and he was pickin’ a guitar”
So there he was. A barefoot boy in half-buckled overalls, picking a guitar right out in the road. And he wasn’t alone. The neighborhood kids had crowded around him so tight that they blocked the street.
Nancy still remembered how he looked. “He had blonde hair. He had on some kind of white short shirt with some overalls on.” Blond was his natural color back then.
She was trying to get to the store, and the crowd was in her way. So she did what any grown woman in that neighborhood would do. She hollered.
“Would you all kids get out of the street. You all standin’ around. Let me back. Get out of the street.”
Then she asked who the boy was. “One of the kids said “That’s Elvis Presley.””
The name didn’t impress her one bit. She gave her answer on the spot.
“He oughta go home!”
You can almost hear her saying it.
The best part came years later. In May 1967, that same boy who’d been holding up traffic on her street hired her to work in his home at Graceland. The teenager she’d wanted sent home became the man whose house she kept.
Nancy told plenty of stories about her years at Graceland. This one comes from before she ever walked through the door, back when Elvis was just a Humes kid with a guitar and a crowd, and a neighbor who’d seen about enough.