Tomorrow is Veterans Day, and anyone who’s ever waited for a soldier to come home knows the feeling. You keep watching the road or the train tracks, and you wonder what they’ll say first.
In March 1960, all of Memphis was waiting for Elvis Presley.
He’d spent two years in the US Army, most of it in West Germany. On Jan 20, 1960, he was promoted to sergeant. On March 5, 1960, his active duty was over. After that he caught a train from the East Coast and rode it south toward home.
It was a cold trip. When the train got close to Memphis on the morning of Monday, March 7, snow was coming down and an icy wind was blowing across the platform.
As the train pulled into Memphis Union Station at about 7:45 a.m., Elvis said something, almost to himself, and a reporter caught it.
“I’ve been gone a long time, a long time,” he said, according to the Memphis Press-Scimitar.
Somebody asked what he’d missed most about Memphis. He didn’t have to think about it. “Everything. I mean that, everything.”
When the train stopped, the conductor, H. D. Kennamer, told him, “It was nice to have you aboard.” Elvis answered, “Thank you, sir.”
Out in the snow, about 200 fans, reporters and curious folks were pressed up behind a six-foot wrought-iron fence, chanting “We want Elvis.” But it was one young man in that crowd who got Elvis to stop.
His name was Gary Pepper. Gary was a Memphis fan who had cerebral palsy, and he ran a fan club called the Elvis Tankers. He’d been close to the Presleys since before the Army, which you might remember from an earlier story here.
Bitsy Mott, the brother-in-law and aide of Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, wheeled Gary through the crowd so he could reach the singer.
Gary apologized to Elvis for the small crowd. Elvis greeted him warmly and told him, “I’ll see you later, pal.”
The Memphis Press-Scimitar reported that in that moment, Elvis seemed to be holding back tears.
Then it was time to go home. Police captain Fred Woodward drove Elvis to Graceland, lights flashing, and got him there in under 30 minutes. His father, Vernon, and his grandmother Minnie Mae had lived with him in Germany, so for the first time in a long while the house was full again.
This footage of his return to Graceland that day is worth watching for a look at the morning he finally made it home.
Elvis coming home to Graceland, March 7, 1960
That afternoon, Elvis met the press in the office building behind the house. He was honest about how he felt. “If I act nervous, it’s because I am,” he told reporter Bill Burk.
This interview was recorded in Memphis that same day, so you get to hear his voice from the day he came home.
Elvis talking with reporters in Memphis that day
The newspaper summed up the whole day in one line. “The king was once again on his throne,” the Press-Scimitar wrote.
But the part worth remembering this Veterans Day happened before any of that, out on a snowy platform. A sergeant just back from two years away stopped in the cold to say hello to a friend. If there’s a soldier coming home somewhere in your own family’s story, you probably know how that felt.