Viva Fort Hood
Before he morphed into a light-comedy star and bloated Vegas entertainer, Elvis Presley drove tanks, chased women, and cruised with the locals in Central Texas, where he spent six months as an Army private.
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Basic training is exactly that—the fundamentals. Reveille blew a little before five, and in the mornings Elvis and the other six thousand recruits sat in classrooms. In the afternoons they exercised and marched five, ten, and twenty miles at a time. They shot rifles and pistols and practiced hand-to-hand combat with bayonets. They inched along on their backs over fields of sharp stones and barbed wire with machine gun fire zipping over their heads. Then they did the course on their stomachs. At night they did it again and watched the tracers shooting by overhead. Elvis, who had been in ROTC in high school, was made an acting squad leader, as were Mansfield and another Tennessean from the bus, William Norvell, Elvis’ next-door cot-mate whom he had nicknamed Nervous. As acting squad leaders, they were also corporals of the guard, in charge of the men pulling guard duty. They wore armbands and saw that orders were carried out. Like most of the men, Elvis got his share of shooting medals: a Marksman medal with the rifle and a Sharpshooter with the pistol. Elvis the perfectionist studied his field manuals late into the night, and he witnessed his first karate demonstration, put on by his sergeants. His hair, naturally dark blond, got lighter in the Texas sun.
Elvis loved all of it, says Dorton Matthews: “The organization, the people, the everyday life, the routines. You get up in the morning, you knew what you were gonna do tomorrow morning and the one after. No big surprises.” And as soon as they saw he was just another recruit, he became one of the guys. “I thought he was gonna get special treatment,” remembers another private, Simon Vega. “But he did KP, guard duty, everything, just like us. Did every detail we did.” The teasing had stopped by the end of basic. Of course, Elvis did get minor special treatment when no one was watching. He could, for example, sneak out of the barracks and go see Anita Wood, his girlfriend, if nothing was going on. She had arrived one night from Jackson, Tennessee, and she was conveniently staying at the home of Sergeant Norwood. Elvis saw her often.
Elvis didn’t bring his guitar, but several of the other recruits did, and some nights they would sit around and play. “It was like when people in the country get together and play music,”remembers Matthews. One afternoon the platoon was in formation with time to kill before a march. Elvis went into the day room and began playing the piano. “We were all standing there listening,” says Matthews. “Finally a colonel came looking for us and yelled at us to get going. We had to double-time it there. We told him, ‘Don’t you ever play the piano again.’” Elvis’ homesickness was perhaps alleviated by the 15,000 fan letters he was getting every week. And the girls who chased him every day. Fort Hood was (and is) an open base; anyone could drive on. “We chased him all the time,” remembers Sandra Oslin Bright. “And he was always so cordial to us.” Jane Levy Christie, then a junior in high school, remembers, “One of the pastimes was on weekends my friends and I would go out on the base and try to find him. Some of the freshmen and sophomores went squealing after him. We thought that was kind of gauche. But it was okay to drive around on Fort Hood and look for him. Once we found him and took him for a ride to the Dairy Queen, which our boyfriends didn’t like very much.” The girls seemed to know where he was, as if they were sending secret messages to each other, fired by hormones. It helped that the Army kept a schedule, so they knew, for example, when Elvis would go to the telephone building to call home. They would be there, waiting. And inevitably he’d come out, talk, sign autographs, and kiss someone on the cheek. Matthews remembers the only time they had a problem. “One night I heard a commotion. It was around midnight. We ran out. There were fifteen or twenty women in the barracks looking for Elvis. We had to have guards after that.”
On May 31 the recruits got a two-week leave before their next phase of training began. Elvis drove to Memphis with Mansfield and Nervous Norvell. He recorded five songs in a Nashville studio, his first session without longtime partners Scotty Moore and Bill Black. And he hung out with his buddies at Graceland. He wore his uniform often, and when a reporter asked him why, he replied, “Simple. I’m kinda proud of it.” Upon his return to Fort Hood, he found out that, since basic was over, he could live off the base—as long as he had dependents living in the area. Within a week, Elvis’ mother and father—Gladys and Vernon—as well as his grandmother Minnie and one of his right-hand men, Lamar Fike, were living in a three-bedroom trailer near Fort Hood. They outgrew that in a hurry and soon found a large three-bedroom home in Killeen for rent from Chester Crawford, a lawyer who gouged them for an outrageous $700 a month. Elvis didn’t mind—he could afford it.
Killeen, born on the railroad line in 1882 and forever partnered with Fort Hood, is a confident place, one that wouldn’t know modern evil until 1991, when George Hennard smashed his pickup through a Luby’s window, got out, and methodically shot 22 people dead. If he is Killeen’s dark memory, Elvis is the sweet, nostalgic bond. Almost everyone in town seems to have some connection, however thin, with him: the waitress at the Hallmark Restaurant whose old boyfriend served with him; the friend of the librarian who had taken the receipt with “Elvis Presley” on it out of the back seat of his open Cadillac and still felt a little guilty; the former baby-sitter who slid over on the front seat of her car and let Elvis drive his buddies to the post theater and still recalled the incandescence of the moment 42 years later. Polly Peaks-Elmore, a cheerful 69-year-old, saw Elvis at the Heart O’ Texas Coliseum in Waco. She wasn’t, she insists, one of the screaming girls. “Oh, no,” she says with a twinkle in her eye. “I was married with two sons.” Now she’s driving along Oak Hill Drive, a street that winds along a rise just above U.S. 190. “At one point,” she says, “Oak Hill Drive was the elite street in Killeen.” Most of the houses here are trim and neat one-story brick—red, beige, or white. The house at 605, lawyer Crawford’s place, is beige with a four-foot base of red brick along the bottom. It sits back from the street and has a large front yard with trees. Inside, the carpet has been replaced, the fireplace has been remodeled, and the walls have been repainted, but the counter tile in the kitchen is the same blazing Pepto-Bismol pink it was 42 years ago. The toilets (now burgundy) were once pink too. This, you would think, made Elvis very happy.
Immediately after he and his family moved in, the crowds began showing up, usually around the time he’d get home from the base. They’d sit in the lawn or stand in the street, talking—most of them knew each other—and waiting. When Elvis got home from work, he’d stand outside and talk to the fans, sometimes for hours. “He was a sweet person,” says neighbor Joan Weiss. Kathy Wells Gilmore was ten and waited one day with her aunt and cousin after everyone else had left. Elvis drove up. “He came out to the street where we were standing and visited with us for a long time,” says Gilmore. “He acted like we were the most important thing in the world. Then he kissed me on the cheek. I didn’t wash my face for two months!”
Elvis had always treated his fans with affection. At Graceland he would often come out and sign autographs for hours. “They’re my life’s blood,” he would say about his fans, though in Killeen, if he’d had a long day, he would have his driver let him out down on U.S. 190, then he’d climb the hill and sneak his way into his back yard. Or he’d detour through Bob Young’s deer pen on the east side, after Young gave him a key. Or he’d just cut through the yards on the other side. Once, says Janie Sullivan, who lived two doors down, he had his driver let him out farther down the street. “He was coming across our back yard, and he got his neck caught in our clothesline. Just then, Victor, our son Gerry’s dog, hit him. Got him by the pants leg.” Almost always, though, after he had gone inside and relaxed, he would come out and visit with fans.
Not everybody thrilled to the sight of Elvis. “I was raising a family, and I was busy,” says Razz Duncan, who lived next door. “I liked to hear him playing the piano and singing, but I’m not going to go panting after him.” Other Oak Hill residents called the police one night about all the dust raised by cars coming down the street and turning around at unpaved Young Circle. Teenagers petitioned the city council to change the name of the street to Presley Drive; the motion, said officials, was tabled for further study.
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