In 1956, Elvis Presley was 21 years old and suddenly everywhere. Newspapers wanted to know who this young man really was, and one New York columnist went straight to the people who knew him best.
His name was Sidney Fields. He sat down with Elvis’s parents, Vernon and Gladys Presley, at the family’s home in Memphis and turned the visit into a five-part series for the New York Daily Mirror called “The Real Story of Elvis Presley.”
That year the Presleys lived at 1034 Audubon Drive, the house Elvis had bought for his mom and dad. Fields talked with them in the living room, which he described as “mixed modern and traditional with a touch of gaudiness.”
It was a proud parents’ kind of conversation. Vernon and Gladys talked about Elvis as a boy, years before he was famous. And Vernon brought up something the two of them used to do together.
When Elvis was little, Vernon took him to carnivals. There, Vernon said, he “taught him how to pitch baseballs at wooden bottles and win stuffed animals.”
It’s a classic father-and-son moment. A dad showing his boy how to wind up and knock the bottles down so he could walk away with a prize.
You’d think that would have ended once Elvis became a star. It didn’t.
This short documentary on the Audubon Drive house shares stories from the home where the Presleys welcomed that reporter, and where Elvis’s latest carnival win was sitting that very day.
The Presleys’ Audubon Drive home and its stories
Vernon told Fields the truth about his famous son’s old habit.
“He still does it. Last week he won a toy dump truck. It’s in the living room.”
A toy dump truck. Elvis Presley, already a national sensation at 21, still stepped up to the carnival booth, threw his baseballs and carried home the prize. And he didn’t hide it away. It sat right there in his parents’ living room, where a big-city newspaperman could see it.
The dump truck wasn’t alone, though. Gladys gave Fields a look at Elvis’s own room, and the main feature in there was easy to spot. Fields described it as full of “stuffed animals: teddy bears, pandas, elephants, monkeys, dogs, everywhere.”
So all those years of tossing baseballs at wooden bottles had paid off. The boy Vernon took to the carnival had turned into a young man with a bedroom packed with his winnings and a toy truck parked in the living room.
It’s a sweet thing to know about Elvis in 1956. The whole country was talking about him, and back home in Memphis he was still pitching baseballs at wooden bottles, just the way his dad showed him when he was little.
And in that living room on Audubon Drive, right where the reporter could see it, sat a little toy dump truck that a 21-year-old star had won himself.