Back in early 1957 Elvis Presley was already the biggest name in music, but his mother Gladys Presley was still a quiet Memphis woman who liked to run her own errands. One winter afternoon she was waiting in the family car outside Lowenstein’s East, a big department store in Memphis, when a young woman walked straight up to the car and rapped on the glass.
The young woman was Virginia Grant, a local real estate agent. As Virginia Grant’s family tells it, she had spotted the pink Cadillac in the parking lot and figured out whose it was. Most people would have kept walking. She knocked instead.
Inside sat Gladys, Elvis’s mom. The two of them got to talking about houses. Elvis wanted to move his parents somewhere with more room and more privacy, because fans were starting to turn up at the family’s place at all hours, and Gladys wanted a little peace.
That knock on the car window is where the whole thing started.
Grant began showing the Presleys homes around town, and nothing felt right. Gladys had grown up with almost nothing, and now that her son could afford it, she knew exactly the kind of place she wanted. After one house that didn’t suit her, she turned to Grant and asked a simple question that tells you everything about her taste.
What Gladys asked the agent
“Don’t you have anything to show us with a Colonial home?”
That one question pointed Grant toward a white-columned house out on Highway 51, in a Memphis neighborhood called Whitehaven. The road goes by the name Elvis Presley Boulevard now. The house was Graceland, the mansion that would become the most famous home in American music. Back then it was just a grand old place on about 13 acres, being sold on behalf of a woman named Ruth Brown Moore.
Gladys loved it on sight. She talked Vernon, Elvis’s dad, into driving out to tour it with her.
Then came Elvis. He went to look at the house his mother had found, and the moment he saw it he was sold. He told a reporter what he pictured for it.
“This is going to be a lot nicer than Red Skelton’s house when I get it like I want it.”
Red Skelton was a hugely popular comedian and TV star of that time, so that was Elvis’s way of saying he was aiming high. He bought Graceland in March 1957 for $102,500. The first thing he took care of was a bedroom for his mother, and he even had a chicken coop put in for her, because Gladys liked to keep chickens the way she had done back home.
All of it traces back to a young agent who saw a pink car in a parking lot and decided to knock.
The photos below show Graceland’s white columns in those early days, the family’s pink Cadillac that sits at the home today, along with Gladys and Vernon at the place their son bought for them.