Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [21]
By 1943, Vernon was working hard to stabilize his family’s finances and to establish himself as a worthy citizen after his incarceration at Parchman. He continued to travel to find work—moving the whole family to the Mississippi Gulf Coast town of Pascagoula that May, where he and his cousin Sales Presley, Annie’s husband, signed on at the Moss Point Shipyard. But by the end of June, all the Presleys were homesick and returned to Tupelo. Vernon found a job as a driver for L. P. McCarty and Sons, a wholesale grocer, and the family continued to enjoy what must have seemed like prosperity, compared to so many other stressful periods of their lives.
The following year, Elvis started fourth grade at Lawhon Elementary. It was a significant time in the young boy’s life, as it was probably this year that he “courted” his first real girlfriend, Elois Bedford. (Caroline Ballard had earlier won his heart, but the “relationship” was short-lived.) After Elvis became famous, Elois would forget precisely when their “romance” started, but she never forgot his smile, more a perpetual silly grin than anything else. “I can close my eyes now and still see him walking toward me,” she said in the early 1990s. “I picked him out of all the boys. He picked me out of all the other girls. As far as dating, we didn’t. We were too young.”
Theirs was a typical interaction for children of their age—they wrote notes to each other in class, called each other “boyfriend” and “girlfriend,” and spent time together at various events, particularly the Halloween carnival, where they entered the cakewalk. Elois remembered him as a loner—quiet and well mannered, wearing “very common clothes,” either overalls or khaki pants and shirt, but always clean. Elvis was already starting to distinguish himself with his singing.
“What I remember most about him was his singing in chapel [at school]. I can still see him singing ‘Old Shep.’ It was so pretty. He had such a beautiful voice back then. I remember our fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Dillard, saying, ‘One of these days he is going to be on the radio.’ ”
“Old Shep,” Red Foley’s mournful story of a boy and his dog, was the kind of tearjerker that made up the backbone of country music of the era. But the tragic saga would have strongly resonated with a child who had experienced his own painful loss, and Elvis’s friend Becky Martin recalled that he imbued it with such emotion that some of his schoolmates cried when he sang it.
Elvis was still stuck on the song the following year, impressing his fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Oleta Grimes, the daughter of Orville Bean, who was once more doing business with Vernon, having just sold him a new four-room house on East Tupelo’s Berry Street. Mrs. Grimes found Elvis to be such a promising singer (“He sang so sweetly”) that she took him to the school principal, J. D. Cole, who agreed with her—the boy had talent. Mrs. Grimes spoke with Gladys, and they agreed to enter Elvis in the talent contest on Children’s Day at the annual Mississippi–Alabama Fair and Dairy Show at the Fairgrounds. The first-place winner would receive a trophy and a $25 war bond, and even the runners-up could go home with a smaller trophy, or at least $2.50 worth of fair rides. Ten-year-old Elvis, wearing eyeglasses, a necktie, and suspenders to hold up his pants, climbed up on a chair for yet another a cappella rendition of “Old Shep.”
For decades, the story circulated that Elvis won second place, but in fact, he did not. Nor did he win third or fourth, but rather fifth. Shirley Gillentine, who belted out “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time,” secured first place. And Nubin Payne, who wrote her own song, “Someday,” and accompanied herself on guitar, came