December 1st 1957

Saw this article on ElvisNews

50 years ago today- December 1st 1957:

As reported in the Memphis Commercial Appeal fifty years ago. "Elvis Presley did something yesterday that must have done his heart a lot of good. He bought tickets for every member of the Humes High School student body 1,400 of them to the E.H. Crump Memorial Football Game for the Blind Friday night. The total cost, at the advance student ticket price of 75 cents, will be $1,050. (Elvis said the students who don't want to keep their tickets can give them away.) But it wasn't so much the money that made the act the kind of thing that would warm not only the cockles of the heart but also the auricle and ventricle. It goes, in fact, even beyond the blow that figures to accompany so grand a gesture in behalf of the blind of one's community. The essence of it is that Elvis is an old (22) Humes boy himself, and just a half a dozen years ago he had to quit the football squad because not to put too fine a point on it he was too poor. "I had to quit and go to work," Elvis recalled yesterday. "That's the way it had to be."

Source : http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2007/...n-better-times/

This was typical of Elvis. He never forgot his roots and gave generously, and more often than not, anonymously, all his life. One of the many reasons why we admire the man