Graceland Beginnings [Elvis]

Chapter 1 - Toof Family Farm, 1880

Well, here we are! The Elvis story poll winner! This one will be exciting for me to write and exciting for Elvis, too, since he loves westerns and that time era. I hope you guys like this one, and I'm sorry for the people who voted on other stories. I'll eventually get to those! I plan to write them all, I just didn't know where to start.

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Finally, it was mine. After coveting the house and property since I first saw it when my family moved to Memphis, it was finally mine for just over $100,000. When I was younger, I never remotely thought that this house would eventually be mine. It was a pipe dream. Something unreachable. A miracle would have to happen before I would have a fourth of the amount needed to purchase the place. I wanted a decent home for my whole family to live in, and while the Audubon Drive house was alright, it was always flooded with fans and journalists. We needed someplace more private, with more land. Graceland was perfect.

The place needed to be decorated and furnished since it was hollow on the inside with nothing but dirty sheets lining the floors, and I knew that my parents thought the same thing as we all stood in the living room, including Grandma Minnie Mae, who we liked to affectionately call Dodger.

"This place will be livable in no time, Momma," I assured my lovely mother as I put an arm around her shoulders, and I smelled her perfume that she always used. "This place is ours. We can do whatever we want with it. I'm thinkin' we get some chickens and some horses to put in the back, huh? With all that space? I'm gonna do me some ridin'."

"Love Me Tender is on the brain," my father Vernon commented. "You love your westerns, son."

"You bet I do. I fell in love with 'em as I was doin' that film. The wild west, old times... It's fascinatin'."

Honestly, it would be interesting to see how life was like back then, back before the modern TV and telephone. Dodger would know all about that since she was born around 1890. When I was doing my film, I was always talking to her about those times, seeing if I was doing the time period proud in the film.

"Yes, and back then, things were cheaper," Momma jutted in. "Really, the price we had to pay for this place, Elvis..."

I kissed the side of her face, on her smooth skin. "It was worth it, Momma. We're gonna live here for the rest of all of our lives. Ain't nothin' gonna stop that. Now, let's work on gettin' some furniture in here, huh? As of right now, we need at least a sofa, piano and TV."

"And beds," Daddy added. "It would be nice to have those. Remember when we purchased that house back in Tupelo, Gladys? The one Elvis was born in? We slept on the hard floor on a blanket for three nights before we got a bed."

Momma held onto her lower back. "Golly gee, Vernon, don't remind me of that. My back's still achin' from sleepin' on that hard floor."

I chuckled at that and went back outside to the front yard where there was an old fence lining the front drive. To think, all this was once all fields. When Momma and Daddy were looking around for another place after I gave them a budget of $100,000 and asked them to find a farm-themed house with some space around it, they did some digging when I "casually" mentioned Graceland. Momma had a friend who worked at the Memphis Historical Society, and the gal told her about Graceland...

The house had been empty for years before we bought the place up. It was owned by a family with the last name of Toof, and the father of the family worked for a printing firm. His family owned the property up to when the house was built in the late thirties. The story was, that in the late 1800s, he passed it to his daughter Grace who eventually gave it to a family member before she passed. Well, since I came here and heard the name of the property, I had been curious as to how it got its name. Mr. Toof named it after that daughter, Grace.