Most famous people who give to charity make sure somebody’s watching. Elvis Presley did the opposite. Starting in 1961 and continuing for the rest of his life, he sat down every Christmas and wrote cheques to more than 50 charities in Memphis — often totaling over $100,000 a year. He didn’t do it for a photo opportunity. He didn’t take the tax write-off. Most people in his own city had no idea it was happening.
The list of who got the money tells you a lot about him. It wasn’t fashionable causes. It was the American Cancer Society, the Arthritis Foundation, the Kidney Foundation, Goodwill Industries, the Braille Institute, Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center, a maternity home, the Salvation Army, the Fraternal Order of Police, and Boys Town in Nebraska. Ordinary local charities, doing unglamorous work.
The numbers were serious money for the time. In November 1962, he handed the Mayor of Memphis a $50,000 donation. Just before Christmas in 1963, he was back in the mayor’s office with $55,000 to be split among 58 local charities. By December 1966, the annual figure had reached $105,000. He also pledged over $10,000 to the Memphis Jewish Community Center building fund.
How Elvis Presley Gave Away Millions of Dollars to Charity and Changed Lives
And it started long before the money was easy. In December 1957, aged 22, he donated $1,050 so that every student at his old school, Humes High, could attend a charity football game for the blind. That same month, he gave toys to a Marine Corps drive for underprivileged children. He was the first person to contribute to a Memphis charity called Coffee Day for Crippled Children. And while stationed in Germany in 1959, he lined up with the other soldiers and gave blood to the German Red Cross — his blood donor card is still kept at Graceland.
Then there are the small things nobody was meant to know about. He quietly paid friends’ medical bills, often sending a personal get-well note with the money. He personally delivered a brand new wheelchair to a disabled woman. Fans posted him thousands of teddy bears over the years, and he had them given away to children’s hospitals.
The city eventually noticed anyway. In 1967, the Mayor of Memphis and the Governor of Tennessee together declared an official “Elvis Presley Day” in recognition of what he’d been quietly doing, and Memphis presented him with a large wooden plaque listing the more than fifty local charities he’d supported. That plaque is still on display at Graceland, alongside some of the actual cheques he wrote.
His daughter Lisa Marie said some of her best memories of her father came from exactly this — watching him give things to people who needed them. And it hasn’t stopped. The Elvis Presley Charitable Foundation continues its work today. It has built Presley Place, a housing project that provides homeless families with rent-free housing while they get back on their feet.
He gave away as many as 200 Cadillacs in his lifetime, and those are the stories everyone tells. The cheques were the bigger thing, and he barely told anyone.