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Brenda Berryman, One of the Lucky Ones

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There are few moments in life a person could never forget. Mrs. Brenda Berryman has two: meeting her late husband, Ray Berryman, and kissing the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley.

Mrs. Brenda Berryman is an Elvis Presley fan, through and through. During her childhood, Elvis was everywhere. There wasn’t a person alive who didn’t know about the King, and Brenda found herself lucky several times in her life when it came to Elvis.

Long before the fateful day she kissed him, Brenda made her own connections to Graceland. Her parents’ friends knew a couple who lived in Whitehaven and knew Elvis’s Uncle Vernon. At ten-years-old, Brenda and her family took a trip to visit the couple in Whitehaven, where they were introduced to Uncle Vernon. He was taking care of Graceland while Elvis was serving in Germany, so he allowed the family to take a walk through the estate — through the mansion’s front doors, through the living room, and out into the back yard.

It was during the spring, Brenda remembers, because the buttercups in the backyard were blooming. One conversation she will never forget, with help from her parents’ teasing over the years, was when she asked Uncle Vernon if she could pick a buttercup from the backyard. He jokingly responded, “Yes, ma’am! You can take the butter but leave the cup.”

She kept that buttercup pressed in a book for years until it crumbled.

When she reached seventh grade, Brenda and her family moved from Selmer to Bolivar. She stayed in Bolivar until after she graduated high school.

She moved to Whitehaven with her first husband, Jimmy. Their apartment was only a few minutes away from Graceland. She remembers applying for an insurance job across the street from the legendary mansion, just so she could see it every day.

It is important to know that there were a few Elvis facts everyone in the Memphis-Whitehaven area knew. One of which is that if the gates to Graceland were open, Elvis was home.

“He was very open to the public,” said Mrs. Brenda. Every time he returned home (from tour, from his other house in California, etc.), he asked his personal guards to open the gates to Graceland, allowing anyone to walk onto the yard. Guards would be stationed around the yard, keeping all visitors in-check, but Elvis made himself easily approachable. He was always humble and treated his supporters well when they visited.

Brenda would drive by Graceland every morning and afternoon on her way to- and from work. She had more opportunities than most people to see the legendary performer, and she visited Graceland two or three times while Elvis was home. Saved in boxes at her house are photos she took of Elvis and Priscilla riding horses in their backyard.

Mrs. Brenda recalls being in the right place at the right time the day she kissed Elvis. No one ever knew when he would be home, so people would often drive past the mansion on random days. Brenda was driving with her sister-in-law that day when they passed Graceland, seeing the gates wide open.

She turned to her sister-in-law and asked, “Do you want to see Elvis?” This was in the late 1960s or early 1970s, so it was more of a rhetorical question than anything. Her sister-in-law agreed, so Brenda turned the car around and headed to Graceland.

When they arrived, they saw Elvis standing on a tree stump signing autographs for the large group of women surrounding him. Brenda and her sister-in-law stood off to the side, not needing an autograph. Brenda already had one from another visit.

All of a sudden, when Elvis bent over to hand out an autograph, a woman in the crowd reached up and pulled the man down for a kiss. The next thing Brenda knew, every girl on Elvis’s lawn was lined up to kiss the King — including herself.

“It was like a dream,” she said, recalling the kiss. She remembers waking up the next morning unable to believe it actually happened.

Elvis’s presence lingered in southwest Tennessee even when he was not around. Everyone knew his habits, including what hospital room he stayed in and how foil would cover the windows if he was there. Brenda remembers people asking her what floor she stayed on after giving birth to her son, Brian, at Baptist Hospital. When she told them, they said she was on Elvis’s floor.

Eventually, Mrs. Brenda left the southwest Tennessee area to live in McKenzie. She met and married Ray Berryman and worked at McKenzie City Hall until retiring.

Today, she’s a proud mother and grandmother who only listens to Elvis Radio in her car. She’s seen Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis twice, both times at McKenzie’s Park Theatre. “I picked up on a lot of things the second time I watched it that I didn’t even notice the first time,” she said. “I’d probably watch it again if they played it and notice even more.”