The Day a Teenage Boy Met Elvis and the Colonel and Began Working with Them for the Rest of His Life

On this episode of Our American Stories, doing maintenance in mansions, you could meet anyone, talk about anything - even find your career as an agent!

Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. Greg MacDonald got
his start in show business as a teenager after meeting
Elvis Presley and his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, while changing
their AC filters in Palm Springs, California. Greg went on
to manage Ricky Nelson for seventeen years and worked under

(00:31):
Colonel Parker and Elvis shortly after Parker began managing Elvis
in the nineteen fifties. Here's Greg with the first time
he met Elvis and Colonel Tom Parker.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
When I was a young kid, my dad was a
part time preacher and a part time air conditioning mechanic.
We used to work for Oral Roberts, who was a
famous evangelist preacher. Well ORL. Roberts had this giant tent
that used to belong to Ringling Brothers. It had ten

(01:12):
thousand seats, and my dad was one of the preachers,
and we'd travel with that tent and set up ten
thousand chairs and set up the stage and put the
tent up and when the revival was over, When ORL.
Roberts was finished with that revival, we'd come back to

(01:32):
Palm Springs, California, where my dad did pretty good in
air conditioning, because it's very odd here. He was in
the air conditioning business. So I was only a young
teenage kid, and my dad and the company had me
out changing filters in the Los Palmis area of Palm Springs, California.

(01:54):
And at that time that's where all of this. A
lot of the old movie stars lived there. So Elvis
was renting a house that belonged to the Jack Warner,
the famous from Warner Brothers studio. Well, I didn't I
knew it was the Warner House because I had a
key to the house. It was summertime and I was

(02:15):
supposed to go in and change the air conditioning filter.
So I'm in the house. It's hot outside. I don't
think anybody's home. So the air handler for the air
conditioning system was in the hall inside the house. So
you had to change the filter in the belt, which

(02:37):
is all I could do. I was just a kid.
I had to take a screen off and crawl under
the air hander, and I'm under the heater air handler
and I'm laying on my back and I'm reaching down
for my tools, and there's this little white dog trying

(02:57):
to bite and I'm cursing the dog and I'm annoyed
with this dog. And every time I reach down into
the hall, I'm laying on my back and my feet
are out in the hall. So every time I reach
out from my hip joint toolbox, this dog tries to bite.
So I'm cursing pretty loud. Now I don't think anybody's home.

(03:21):
So I look down between my shoes and there's a
face down there, and it's Elvis. And I knew it
was Elvis even when I was down on my back.
He grabs a dog and he keeps looking underneath where
I am, and he says, boy, what are you doing
under there? I said, I'm trying to change your darn filter.

(03:42):
But your dog's trying to eat me up. He says,
he's laughing at me. Now he says, come out from
under there, and so I crawl out, and I knew
it was Elvis immediately. You know, he was only wearing
a rope. He wasn't wearing his jumpsuit of me. So
I get out and we start talking and he thinks
it's so funny about that dog, and I said, well,

(04:04):
I said, oh, well, your dog's trying to eve. It's
not my dog. The girl out there by the pool.
It blad dog belongs to her. She's a friend of him,
but she wasn't dressed. And as soon as he figured
that out, he went over to the curtain and shut
the curtain. Elvis was pretty cool about that, so he said,
what are you doing? You're just a kid, what are

(04:25):
you You're a mechanic. I said, well, I'm not really
a mechanic. I can change these filters and I get
so much a house and I'm going on my bike
with a wagon all over the neighborhood here and he said,
this isn't my house. It belongs to mister Warner from
Jack Warner Studios. And I don't really know who that is,
but obviously he did. So he says sit down, and

(04:51):
we sit down, and he says, why are you doing this?
I said, well, we have to work, and I told
him I said, we work for Oral Roberts, and he
immediately sparked Oral Roberts. He says, I know Oral Roberts.
I love Oral Roberts. So he starts quizzing me about.
He said, so your dad's a preacher and I said yeah.

(05:14):
He said, well that means you're an assembly of God kid.
I go, yeah, I guess I am, and he says,
you know, so am I. I went to the Assembly
of God in Tupelo, Mississippi. My mama brought me there.
So now this sets off another We weren't talking about rock
and roll music. We were talking about preachers. And he's
testing me. Now. He says, tell me, did they bring

(05:37):
snakes to your church? I said, yes, they did, Yes,
they did. They brought rattle sakes. And he said yeah.
And I said, my mom used to sit us in
the middle pew so that we if we sat near
the aisle. The idea was, if the snake reached out
for you, you had sinned, you were a sinner. And Elvis

(05:59):
is laughing all over the room. He says, my mom
glad us did the same thing. She said, us in
the middle pew so we wouldn't be near the rattlesnake.
And now both of us are laughing about this snake
because it really did scare the crap out of me.
So that's what we're talking about, you know. And he says,
so you travel with a tint. I go, yeah, we do.

(06:22):
So he wants to know how we put that tent
up and I said, well, it's an old circus tent.
It's a canvas tent with all the poles and the
ropes and all the roughnecks. Those are the men that
grab those poles and push the canvas up, they called roughnecks.
These are all old tough guys, mainly old circus hands.

(06:46):
He said, well, how do you pull that up with
an elephant? He said, no, we don't have any elephants
on the show. We do it with big tractor trailer trucks.
He laughed. I said, you think we bring elephants to
the revival, so he told me. I said no, I
guess not, But he'd seen the circus used to pull
up the tent with elephants. And this went on forever,

(07:10):
and we weren't talking about him being a rock and
roll star of music. We were talking about preachers. And
he said, okay, kid, who's the organ player for Earl Roberts?
And I said, a guy named Beauford Dowell. He says,
how do you know that? I said, because one of
my jobs was to help him move his Hammond B

(07:31):
three organ up onto that darn stage in his Leslie cabinet.
And Elvis is now walking around there and laughing out loud.
He says, you're right. He's the best organ player in
the country. And I can't get him to come and
play with me because he won't play secular music, won't
play rock and roll. I said, well, I know him
very well, so through this whole piece with him, which

(07:56):
was very interesting to me. Phone rings and he answers
the phone and somebody named the Colonel is on the phone. Well,
I didn't know who Colonel Parker was. He's obviously telling
the Colonel I'm over here talking to this kid and
he's a funny kid and he works for Oral Roberts

(08:16):
and he's changing my filter in this air conditioner. So
the Colonel told Elvis on the phone, send that kid
over here. I need my filters changed. And it was
only a couple of blocks away where the colonel lived
from the Warner House. So I said goodbye to Elvis.
You know, I'm getting ready to leave, and I'm shaking

(08:37):
his hand and he says, I'll see you somewhere. I'll
see you again, and he didn't really say anything other
than we'd had a lot of fun. So I go
over to the Colonel's house and I knock on the
door and I'm expecting some military guy to show up
and it's just an old man in a robe, and

(08:58):
he says, coming here, So I changed the filter and
then he has be come into his sitting room with
his wife, Marie Katz. They both set my lap and
he says, now, tell me about this story about Oral Roberts.
I love those preachers that went on for twenty seven years.

(09:19):
I got along with him and he just sort of,
I don't know. He kept me as long as he
worked and we were very very close.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
Had a terrific job on the editing, production and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to
Greg McDonald. He's the author of Elvis and the Colonel
and Insider's look at the most legendary partnership in show business,
and he's co author on that book was Marshall Correll.
The story of Greg McDonald's first encounter with Elvis and

(09:52):
Colonel Tom Parker. Here on our American Story