By BETTY WATERS
Tyler Morning Telegraph
May 2007
Memories a daughter has of recently deceased Troup native Shirley Searcy Delgado include accounts of her romance with Elvis Presley in the 1950s.
They met at the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport, dated about three years and even had plans to marry, said daughter Suzanne Delgado, a Troup resident who works in Tyler as a medical claims investigator for insurance companies.
A major reason they did not marry was that the singer's manager, Col. Tom Parker, "wouldn't hear of it. He said that's not a good business move at all," Suzanne Delgado said.
She remembers her mother, who was a Kilgore College Rangerette, telling how she met the singer.
"My mom had a friend who worked at a recording studio and invited my mom over one day for a session. She played an Elvis record and asked my mom, 'what do you think of this singer?' My mom thought it was a young black country singer. This lady said 'He's not black. He's on his way up and he's going to be at the Louisiana Hayride.' She invited my mom," Suzanne Delgado said.
Her mother was standing by the concession stand when Presley spotted her.
"He went over to her and said, 'Hey, do you want to come backstage?' So my mom went with him. When they got back there, Elvis announced to his band members, 'Hey, look what I found.' So they started dating from that," Suzanne Delgado said.
The daughter recalled Tuesday how her mother would talk a lot about how the fans would envelop the singer and her, too, after a concert and would want a piece of his clothing and autograph.
"She was in the middle of all that. They would go out after a gig to eat," she said. "They would get barbecue and stop by a rest area park and eat. He liked quiet moments; he wanted to get away from (the attention showered on him in public)."
When Presley's pink Cadillac caught fire, the singer and Ms. Delgado were inside deep in conversation on the way to the next gig, she said.
"He had apparently left the parking brake on so it overheated as they were riding around. They had to drag out all the instruments. He was under the car trying to put it out and find out where the fire started. She pulled him out," Suzanne Delgado said.
On another occasion, her mother invited her girlfriends to go to a hotel to visit Presley.
"They didn't believe her; they were astounded it was Elvis," Suzanne Delgado said.
Presley called her mother "little doll."
"She said he was really a down to earth, honest and sincere person and he was very spiritual. He liked to do a lot of gospel music. He spoke about his mother a lot; he loved his mother," the daughter remembers her mother saying.
After his manager "put a damper" on their plans to marry, her mother became an executive secretary for an oil and gas company in Shreveport, where she met and married Victor Delgado, a physician doing a medical internship there. They eventually moved to Houston, but later divorced.
After the divorce, Suzanne Delgado said, she was probably 11 or 12 when her mother revealed she had dated Presley and showed her a proposal of marriage the singer had written.
"I didn't believe her at first. Then she pulled out all the signed pictures and maybe a couple of notes he had scribbled to her," Suzanne Delgado said.
Growing up, she remembers, her mother constantly played Presley's music, took her children to see his movies and they lived in a house on Graceland Street in Houston.
She wonders whether the fact that the singer's mansion in Memphis is also named Graceland entered into her mother's decision with her father to buy the house.
Shirley Searcy Delgado, 72, died May 14 in her home from an apparent heart attack.
