With Humes classmates Fannie Crowder (maybe), Virginia Eddleman, Len Ledbetter (maybe), and Georgia Avgeris (maybe) - circa April 1953
Turns out it was posted online back in 2019 by '70s Presley concert photographer Keith Alverson:
Keith Alverson
Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 8:05 PM
Check this photo out friends ..... supposedly 1953 on a school bus trip! Elvis already had the cool threads going on .. right?
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10156310943026269&set=pb.700256268.-2207520000
There are actually a couple of possibilities for the details behind this photo, and the timeline I suggest must be fairly accurate.
One possibility is the teen-agers were at a gospel sing at Ellis Auditorium, and posing by one of the quartet tour buses. Senior Virginia Eddleman and her siblings sang gospel on stage at Ellis from time to time, and we know how much Elvis loved and attended such shows there.
Virginia Eddleman
Everyone knows how Elvis loved "GOSPEL MUSIC."
At Ellis Auditorium, the Statesmen Quartet felt sorry for him because he couldn’t afford a ticket and let him in the back door.
My brother Jerry, my sister Darlene and I were called "The Eddleman Trio". We started singing acappella at ages 7, 8 and 11.
After Elvis became famous, it occurred to me that "we" were singing on the stage, while Elvis was sneaking in the back door.
He later sang on the same stage at benefit concerts.
https://www.elvis-collectors.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=34176
Note Presley's wearing the same jacket in a local newspaper photo from May 1953, and as late as November 1954 in another.
Jaycees "Teen-age Road-eo" contest, Memphis Fairgrounds - Sunday, May 3, 1953
Elvis' curb-adjacent skills in the 20-foot parking stall are measured.
With Barbara Burnette, Dean R.M. Robison and Mayor Frank Tobey at Memphis State College - Sunday, November 7, 1954
Elvis was part of a "Red Feather" charity drive for the Memphis-Shelby County Community chest.
We see the group poses next to a Greyhound bus, so this could also be from a field trip. Elvis has a name tag on his coat, that might strongly imply this was such a trip.
Well, I just found that many of the Humes High School seniors took a field trip . . . to the University of Mississippi following the March 1953 talent show!
"Ole Miss" is in Oxford, MS, about an hour and twenty minute drive from Memphis, so chartering a bus would be mandatory.
I'm betting this is exactly what we're seeing in this photo. Very cool.
George Grimes
Everyone in the talent show got to make a trip to the University of Mississippi as part of Humes Honor Society sponsorship.
https://www.elvis-collectors.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=34176
To top it off, Virginia claimed she never saw Elvis again after graduation week in June 1953, so there's the endpoint of the timeline.
In January 2016, she passed away at the age of 81.
Peoria fan 'singing in heaven' with her Memphis high school classmate Elvis Presley
By Phil Luciano
During the early 1950s, the family of the former Virginia Eddleman lived in the same housing project as the Presleys. The slick-haired Elvis would sometimes give her rides to school in his jalopy, a rust-bucket whose steering wheel often slid out of the dashboard into his hands. He’d just laugh and coast along, eventually getting everything back into place and the pair on time to school.
There, Virginia never heard him sing, except once in a school talent show. Though Presley joined several clubs — biology, English, history and speech — he showed little interest in hitting the books. He was more focused on gaining hands-on experience, especially with girls. Elvis was known for a roving eye, which locked in on Virginia near the end of their senior year.
Presley slowly and slyly began to flirt. As seniors signed each other’s yearbooks, he scribbled a benign “Best of everything to a very swell girl” — but quickly added a coy come-on: “K.U.M.,” Memphis-teen shorthand for “Kiss You Much.”
Days later, their class held a picnic and swim party. Elvis gentlemanly approached the swimsuit-clad Virginia and offered to slather suntan lotion across her back. Soon, with everything going smoothly, he asked if she’d like to go out sometime. Though sorely tempted, she declined.
“He was really flirty, and I was a nice girl,” she later recalled with a chuckle.
But she quickly had second thoughts. She rationalized that if he were to courteously ask again, she could accept. She decided to tempt fate by intentionally running into him at their graduation ceremony and maybe do a little flirting of her own.
But as slick a teen Elvis might’ve been with his hands sometimes, he’d done a lousy job with the suntan lotion. Virginia’s back burned to a crisp, the pain so bad she had to skip graduation.
She never got another shot with Elvis. Soon, he moved on to fame, and she moved to Peoria.
That was the hometown of Robert Blackford, the Navy sailor she married in 1956 and where they’d raise two sons.
Virginia Blackford never saw her duck-tailed classmate again, though she closely followed his career, always loved his music and cried hard when he died.
Peoria Journal Star - Monday, February 1, 2016
https://www.pjstar.com/article/20160201/NEWS/160209971
Virginia Blackford, new Peoria resident
https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/peoria-il/virginia-blackford-6780274
R.I.P. Virginia.
