Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [24]
Yet Gladys would also discipline her son. His friend Guy Harris remembers the day he and Elvis decided to dig up some wild rosebushes, getting sunburned in the process. “We got sun-blistered pretty bad. She fixed our lunch, and Elvis claimed he was too blistered to eat. He was trying to stay outside and away from her as much as he could, ’cause he didn’t want the old switch.”
“I used to get very angry at her when I was growing up,” the adult Elvis admitted. “It’s a natural thing when a young person wants to go somewhere or do something and your mother won’t let you. You think, ‘Why, what’s wrong with you?’ But then later on in the years you find out that she was right—that she was only doing it to protect you, to keep you from getting in any trouble or getting hurt. And I’m very happy that she was kind of strict on me, very happy that it worked out the way it did.”
On January 8, 1946, Elvis’s eleventh birthday, Gladys accompanied her son to the Tupelo Hardware Store to buy him a present. Memories conflict as to just what he picked out—some say a bicycle—but evidence points to a .22-caliber rifle, which he wanted more for target practice than for shooting animals. Once when Vernon had offered to take him hunting, a southern rite of father-son bonding, Elvis begged off. “Daddy,” he said, “I don’t want to kill birds.”
Now Gladys turned to the salesman, Forrest Bobo, who lived in East Tupelo and knew the Presley family.
“Is this a dangerous thing?” Gladys asked.
“Sure, it’s dangerous. It’s a twenty-two. You could kill somebody with it, or you could get killed by it.”
And so, only a few months after Elvis’s competition at the Tupelo Fair, Gladys tried a different tack.
“Son,” she suggested, “wouldn’t you rather have a guitar? It would help you with your singing, and everyone does enjoy hearing you sing.”
According to Billy Booth, who owned the store and heard the story directly from Bobo, Elvis threw a temper tantrum—he didn’t want a guitar. He wanted a rifle. Gladys threatened a spanking for such a public scene, and then she told him he’d get nothing for his birthday if he didn’t straighten up. Bobo, by his account, went back and brought out a midgrade guitar that Elvis would later identify as a Gene Autry model.
“The papers always said it was $12, but it wasn’t—you got a real good guitar back in those days for $12—but this was only $7.75, I believe. Of course, we had a two-cent sales tax.”
Bobo handed it to him, and then took Elvis behind the counter and sat him down on a shell box. Elvis tried to pick out “Old Shep” and reckoned he would have it after all.
“He got the bike, too, later on,” Billy Smith remembers. “Then he wrecked it and broke his arm, so he couldn’t play the guitar for a while.” He also got a rifle, though it had probably been grandfather Jessie’s to start with, as the initials JD were carved on the stock. But Elvis took full ownership, carving his own initials, EAP, as well as the name of a mysterious young lass: JUDY.
After Elvis became famous, numerous people around Tupelo took credit for teaching him the guitar, including his uncle Johnny Smith and Hubert Tipton and Hubert’s brother, Ernest. Reverend Frank Smith, the new pastor at the Assembly of God church, recalled that Elvis already had a lesson book to show him where to put his fingers between the frets to form the chords. “From there,” the minister said, “I taught him to make his runs.”
In contrast to Gaines Mansell, “a real humble type of seller who just tried to lead you to God, but didn’t try to make you do nothing,” as Annie Presley put it, Reverend Smith was outspoken in his belief of the twin poles of sin and salvation. And one thing Elvis did not learn from Smith or anyone else connected with the Assembly of God church, the pastor emphasized, was his sexually suggestive stage moves. “We had some body movements, very outgoing demonstrations, but nothing like what Elvis did. He did all that himself. He never copied anyone.”
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