Fort Chaffee, Elvis Gets His Haircut, 1958
Near Fort Smith, Arkansas
On March twenty-fourth of nineteen fifty-eight, Elvis Aaron Presley reported for induction into the United States Army at the Memphis draft board. Two days later, he was transferred to Fort Chaffee, the large military installation just east of Fort Smith that had been a major training base since the Second World War. He arrived at Chaffee on March twenty-eighth.
What happened next was one of the most photographed haircuts in American history. Army barber James Peterson cut Presley's famous pompadour down to the standard Army regulation cut, surrounded by a scrum of reporters and photographers who had tracked the world's most famous entertainer into a room full of inductees. The Army, recognizing the press value, allowed the cameras in.
The photographs ran on front pages around the world. Private Presley received the same haircut that every other recruit received. Presley spent only a few days at Chaffee for processing before shipping out to Fort Hood, Texas, for advanced training.
He would later deploy to West Germany. The Army handled him, by most accounts, exactly as it handled everyone else, though the volume of mail that arrived for Private Presley during his time in service required a dedicated clerk to manage. Fort Chaffee was established in nineteen forty-one and named for Major General Adna Chaffee, known as the Father of the Armored Force.
It served as a major training installation through the Korean War and Vietnam era. After the nineteen fifty-eight haircut made it briefly the most famous military base in America, it returned to its less glamorous work of training soldiers and supporting armored doctrine.
