Plenty of families will swap old service stories over coffee tomorrow, on Veterans Day. Here’s one from the Presley family, and it starts with a young soldier who had to win over a girl’s father.
In 1959, Elvis Presley wasn’t playing to screaming crowds. He was serving in the US Army in West Germany. Like a lot of servicemen with family around, he lived off base, in a town called Bad Nauheim.
Not far away, in Wiesbaden, lived the Beaulieu family. Paul Beaulieu was an Air Force officer stationed there. He was Priscilla’s stepfather, but she has always called him “my dad.”
Priscilla was 14 and living in Wiesbaden with her family that fall. On Sept 13, 1959, a friend who knew Elvis introduced the two of them at his place in Bad Nauheim.
Her parents didn’t just shrug and say yes after that. They had a rule. Before Elvis could keep coming around, he had to come to the house and meet them in person.
Elvis was fine with that. In fact, he helped plan it. Priscilla later remembered how he coached her: “He set me up by saying, ‘You start talking to your parents and then I’ll call and talk to your parents.'”
So the day came. Elvis brought his father along with him. And he didn’t show up in his everyday clothes.
Priscilla has told the story of how she first met Elvis many times over the years, and this Entertainment Tonight flashback lets you hear her look back on those early days in her own words.
Priscilla looks back on meeting Elvis
Now, about that visit.
Elvis came to the Beaulieu home in his full Army dress uniform. Priscilla told Closer Weekly in 2017, “He came absolutely decked out in white gloves, hat, everything!”
Her dad was an officer himself, and the uniform made an impression. On Australia’s Seven Network show “Sunday Night” in December 2017, Priscilla put it this way: “Elvis came in full uniform, which my dad liked a lot, shook his hand for an hour.”
That’s when things got funny.
The two men got talking and didn’t stop. Air Force officer and Army man, they hit it off right away. Priscilla has said they talked for an hour, and in another interview she remembered it as an hour and a half. Either way it was a long time to sit on the couch and wait.
And Priscilla had come to see Elvis, not to listen to her father. So she sat there checking her watch.
“I am looking at my watch saying, he is taking up my time…” she told Sunday Night.
Every teenager has felt that one. Your parents finally like the person you like, and now they won’t let you get a word in.
“Already he won my father over!” she told Closer Weekly.
It wasn’t the last time Elvis would have to sit down with Paul Beaulieu, either. In 1962 he won her dad over again, promising that Priscilla would be chaperoned and enrolled in a good school in Memphis.
If someone in your family served, tomorrow’s a nice day to ask how they first met the folks. You might get a story that runs a little long.