A little boy sat on a porch in East Tupelo, Mississippi, crying for his daddy. Years later, a cousin remembered he was “crying his eyes out.”
That boy was Elvis Presley. He was three and a half, and his father wouldn’t be coming home for a long time.
Vernon Presley was only 18 when Elvis was born in January 1935. He and his wife Gladys lived in a two-room shotgun house Vernon had built with borrowed money. This was the Great Depression, and steady work was hard to find.
Vernon picked up jobs from a dairy farmer named Orville Bean, who also happened to be his landlord.
In 1937 Vernon sold Bean a hog, hoping for a fair price, and got a check for $4.
He felt cheated. So Vernon and two other men, Gladys’s brother Travis Smith and a friend named Lether Gable, changed the check to a bigger amount. Some accounts say they made it $14 and others say $40, and nobody really knows.
On November 16, 1937, the three were arrested and charged with forgery. Bail was set at $500 each. Travis and Lether got out, but there’s no record that anyone ever posted bond for Vernon.
He ended up sitting in the county jail for about six months, waiting on his case.
Donna Presley, Elvis’s cousin, walks you around the Tupelo he knew as a little boy in this one.
Elvis Before Graceland, Walking Through Tupelo When Elvis Was Just Elvis
On May 25, 1938, a judge sentenced all three men to three years at Parchman Farm, the state prison down in the Mississippi Delta.
Three days later, a guard the convicts called “Long Chain Charley” came and took Vernon away along with eleven other men.
Back home, Gladys couldn’t keep up with the house payments. She lost the little house, and she and Elvis moved in with family.
But she didn’t let Vernon disappear from their son’s life. According to Mississippi’s state archives, she and little Elvis often rode the bus all the way to Parchman on weekends to see him.
That’s a long trip to a prison farm for a 3-year-old, just to sit with his dad for a little while.
Back in Tupelo, a lot of folks were on Vernon’s side. People in Lee County signed a petition asking for his release, and even Orville Bean wrote a letter.
On February 6, 1939, Vernon walked out of Parchman after about eight months there. Mississippi’s governor, Hugh White, had signed off on letting him go early. By then Elvis had just turned 4.
The family never moved back into the house Vernon built, and for years they bounced from one rented place to another.
Those months left another mark too. With Vernon gone, Elvis and Gladys had leaned on each other, and they stayed unusually close for the rest of her life.
Years later, once their son was famous, you can catch Vernon and Gladys together in this old clip.