December 23, 2020 • 39 mins
Most of us grew up with the story of the sweet little reindeer that was picked on by his peers, and becomes the hero who saves Christmas. But Rudolph is unique in that he became part of Christmas tradition almost the moment he was introduced in 1939.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I think
it's safe to say that Rudolph is a beloved holiday
character for a lot of folks. For sure. Yeah, I
(00:22):
don't think I'm really like over steep first stepping. Uh,
you know, common opinion at that point. Most of us,
at this point grew up with the story of this
sweet little reindeer that was picked on by his peers
only to be the triumphant hero who saves Christmas. But
Rudolph is kind of unique in that he became part
of Christmas tradition almost the moment he was introduced in
(00:44):
nine nine. And there are a lot of variations in
the story of Rudolph's origins. This is largely because the
author of the Rudolph story gave a lot of interviews
throughout his life, like over the course of forty years,
and sometimes his narrative shifted a little bit, occasionally contradicting
other versions that he told. There's also another related collaborator
(01:06):
in the Rudolph phenomenon who also gave conflicting accounts, and
because Rudolph's intense popularity was not exactly anticipated, at least
not at the level it achieved. It wasn't as though
this project was being documented and notated as the initial
story was being created. So all of this, you know,
kind of narrative shifting and conflicting accounts, it's really pretty normal.
(01:28):
And today we're going to talk about Robert L. May
and how he created Rudolph, how his reindeer character became
a phenomenon. Will also talk about his collaboration with his
brother in law and how this story became an instant classic.
And we just want to offer a quick disclaimer here
if you are maybe a parent listening with a younger
history fan, this isn't really so much like a fun
(01:51):
Christmas story about uh, you know, the fictional characters. It's
very much real world story stuff going on. Some of
it is um, definitely sad uh and we don't you know,
I wanna wanna make anybody have a unhappy association with
So if you do like to listen with younger listeners,
(02:14):
I would encourage maybe give it a listen first, see
if it's at a level that you're comfortable sharing with them,
and then uh, we're off to the races. But we're
going to jump right into the story. The early life
of Robert L. May is just not particularly well documented.
We know he was born in nineteen o five and
also grew up in New Rochelle, New York, which is
the suburb made famous by the Dick Van Dyke Show. Weirdly,
(02:37):
I've just never associated it with I've associated it with
the the Amtrak train that goes from here to New
York City. Well you made I mean, you're you're a
little bit too young, right for when the Dick Vandyke
Show was super popular. Yeah, I saw it in syndication,
one of these things. It was always on and rerint
(02:57):
somewhere anyway, not in Portant. His parents were well off.
His father, Milton, was from Georgia and owned a lumber business,
and while the family was Jewish, they were also secular.
Robert attended college at Dartmouth, but a few years after
he completed school in nine the stock market crash of
nine nine happened, followed of course by the Great Depression,
(03:20):
and in the course of all of this, the May
family lost a lot of their money. His younger siblings
were not able to attend college. Because of the family's
financial situation and his early career, May worked in copy
and advertising jobs for a series of department stores, including
Macy's and Riches. He got married to a woman named
Evelyn Hayman on November twenty nine. The two of them
(03:43):
had a daughter named Barbara in five. By that point
they had moved to Chicago so Robert could take a
new job working as a copywriter for Montgomery Ward. And
to be very clear, Bob May was really good at
this job. There was a profile that came out about
him as his work started to gain pretty wide recognition
later on, and it included this description quote words are
(04:08):
maize stock in trade, and people who work with him
will tell you, only too willingly, how clever he is
in the use of words, not only any humorous use,
but in making them express sympathy, pathos, admiration as well
as darn good advertising. In early January nine, Robert L.
May was headed into work. He was not feeling particularly festive,
(04:31):
not looking forward to the new year. Later on, he
recalled being thankful as he went into his job. The
holiday decorations in the streets of Chicago had all been
taken down because he was not in the mood for them,
and May's lack of enthusiasm at this point was not
because he was returning to work after the holidays. His
family was going through an incredibly difficult time. His wife, Evelyn,
(04:56):
was going through a long series of cancer treatments after
having been die agnosed in nineteen thirty seven, and over
the two years since her diagnosis, the cost of her
care had really put him in a financially precurious state. Additionally,
he heard two young men in the elevator who were
talking about their plans for the year, and May was
struck with this sense of just being a middle aged underachiever.
(05:19):
He had gotten into writing to become a novelist, and
now he found himself quote at age thirty five, still
grinding out catalog copy instead of writing the Great American
novel as I once hoped, I was describing men's white shirts. Robert,
who went by Bob, got a call from an admin
assistant saying that he needed to report to his boss's office,
(05:42):
and at this point Bob just thought this was some
other dull and uninspiring work assignment. But the assignment he
was about to receive was anything but his standard copy requests.
The story, as May told it went this way. His
department head H. G. McDonald said, quote, Bob, I've got
an idea. For years, our stores have been buying those
(06:03):
little Christmas giveaway coloring books from local peddlers. I think
we can save a lot of money if we create
one ourselves. Could you come up with a better booklet
we could use. May's supervisor went on to tell him
that it should have an animal as the main character,
and mentioned that it should be something like Ferdinand the Bull.
(06:23):
For context, just in case you are not familiar with
that story. The story of Ferdinand, written by Monroe Leaf,
had come out three years earlier and it was a
huge hit. And this tells the story of a young
bull named Ferdinand who has no interest in bullfights. He
doesn't want to fight with other bulls, he doesn't want
to butt heads with them to prove who's stronger, and
he cannot be provoked by matadors. Instead, he just loves
(06:48):
to smell flowers. And by the time May got his assignment,
Ferdinand was one of the most popular books in the
United States, so it's really not surprising that his boss
would reference the pacifist bovine as a model. This is
definitely still something that people were reading when I was
a kid. Yeah. Same. The reason that a catalog copywriter
(07:09):
was chapped for this project was apparently because May had
performed some comedic songs at the company holiday party a
couple of years earlier, and they'd become popular enough that
he was asked to write similar songs for other company events.
So his bosses knew that he could write in verse
using clever word play. As Bob May ruminated on this
(07:29):
assignment later that evening, he started thinking both about Christmas
appropriate animals and the kinds of animals that his daughter,
Barbara liked. Barbara, who was four at this point, loved
the deer at the zoo, so he quickly decided that
a reindeer was going to be the best protagonist. Reindeer
were definitely strongly associated with Christmas already by this point,
(07:51):
so this was a logical step. And the next step
in May's development of the idea was to try to
think of a way to make the story didactic. He
tried to come up with a lesson that this reindeer
could teach to kids. He knew he wanted it to
be an underdog story, According to his account, he thought
about the fact that the ultimate dream for a reindeer
(08:12):
would be to pull Santa sleigh, and in some versions
of the story, May would also mention that he was
inspired by the Hans Christian Anderson story of the ugly
duckling a glance out the window as he was having
all of these thoughts gave May the inspiration for the
key trait that would become forever associated with the name
Rudolph in pop culture. He had noticed that fog had
(08:34):
rolled into the city from Lake Michigan, and his mind
wandered to the story he had been working on, and
when he started wondering exactly how Santa might manage traveling
via flying sleigh in low visibility fog, the idea, he
always said, kind of came to him like a flash.
Rudolph would have a glowing nose that could act as
a floodlight and lead Santa through fog. Bob May was
(08:57):
excited about this idea, somebody who writes, sometimes, I know
what that feels like. His boss was not as receptive
as he hoped, though. When he pitched this at work
the next morning, the reaction was lukewarm at best. May
would later say that the exact reaction was, for gosh sakes, Bob,
(09:17):
can't you do better than that? Uh? Years later, McDonald's wife, Bernice,
said that the reason he was initially put off was
because of the association between red noses and drunkenness. I
could see that logic, sure, um, but this is also
a good moment to think about, like for anybody that
does creative things. I've written stuff, I make various things,
(09:41):
and there are times when you think you put it
together and someone else seas it goes huh. That doesn't
always mean it's not great. So of course we know
that that is not the end of Rudolph. And after
we take a quick sponsor break, we're going to see
how Robert May continued to champion his project and his
little reindeer even after his boss told him to come
(10:02):
up with something else. So we mentioned before the break
that Bob May's boss was not into the Rudolph story.
But thankfully May, who may or may not have already
settled on that name, Rudolph accounts very about it, was
(10:23):
already attached though, to both the character and the story.
So next he turned his creative thinking to how he
could convince his boss that this was really something they
should do, and May decided that if he could just
show him a visual of what he was thinking of,
it might convince him to approve the project to move forward.
The help with this plan, May approached Denver Gillen, who
(10:47):
was a friend of his from the company's art department.
He explained to Denver what the Rudolph story was and
that he needed help convincing higher ups that this is
a good idea. So he asked him, Denver, could you
draw a deer with a big red nos and still
make him look appealing. They struck up a plan to
work on a visual pitch over the weekend, so that
(11:08):
Saturday morning, May, Gillen and May's daughter Barbara, We're all
at the Lincoln Park Zoo looking at the deer, and
Denver made several sketches as they observed the animals, and
then he kind of reworked those into sketches of characters,
and by the time the day ended, May and Gillen
felt like they had something good enough to bring to
work on Monday and asked the bosses to revisit the
(11:30):
Rudolph idea. We've got to give credit to the boss.
He reversed his previous decision after he saw this and
understood the story more fully, saying, quote, Bob, forget what
I said. Put the story into finish form. Yeah, not
all bosses are willing to shift their their stands on things.
So I kind of love that. He was like, no,
(11:53):
I get it, now, this is great. I was wrong. Cool.
Over the next several months, May and Gillen worked on
the project, and the was something that was like they
were still having to do their day jobs. It wasn't
like their plates had been cleared to to only work
on this. So it was a little bit of an
evening since weekends situation. But as this really pretty exciting
(12:13):
opportunity to do something more than right about men's shirts
offered me the creative outlet he had been longing for,
his personal life at this time was not so joyous.
So Bob was working on Rudolph in the evenings and
in his spare time at work, but his wife, Evelyn's
condition was growing more and more grave, and in July
she died, and that left Bob a widower with a
(12:35):
small child. When May returned to work after the loss
of his wife, his boss made it clear that he
did not have to keep working on this Rudolph project,
saying quote, I can understand you're not wanting to go
on with the kid's book. Give me what you've got
and I'll let someone else finish it. But May did
not want to leave this project, and almost four decades later,
when recounting the story, he wrote, quote, but I needed
(12:58):
Rudolph now more than ever. Gratefully, I buried myself in
the writing. May wrote through what must have been just
the height of his grief, and he finished the story
a month after Evelyn died, that was in August of
ninety nine. He shared the story with his in laws,
who were staying with him at the time, and with
his daughter, and their reaction told him that he had
(13:20):
created something really special. He had run some of his
work by Barbara as he worked, and she mentioned in
an interview with NPR in that she had responded negatively
to the words stomach at one point because she thought
that was ikey that got switched to tummy when it
came to describing Santa's shaking belly. I can only imagine,
(13:42):
like a four year old copy editor, that's gross. Change
that word. They're so blunt. A quick note here is
that there is actually a vastly different version of this
origin story, which, like the one we just recounted, kind
of comes from Robert el May himself. It was in
an issue of Coronet Magazine, from an in debt article.
(14:07):
May told the journalist writing the piece that he wrote
Rudolph to comfort his daughter because of Evelyn's illness, and
that his boss at Montgomery Ward heard about the story
and decided to use it for the promotional book. So
whether this was a matter of misinterpretation on the interviewer's
part or May just punching up the story, we don't
a hundred percent no. But that's not the only aspect
(14:29):
of this different tale. There was also a friend of
May's in the mix, Stanley Frankel, who had pitched the
story to Coronet and who might have been the source
of some of this mismatching information, and lore May himself
referred back to the article at various times, though, so
he knew about that version, and he didn't really make
any effort to denounce it. As a consequence, both of
(14:51):
these origin stories persist, although the job assignment version is
actually corroborated. This is one of those things where I
wonder if he just had no sense of the fact
that people would want to look at this as a
part of history. And he's like, man, it's fine, yeah,
it seems pretty no one. No one probably thinks they're like, uh,
(15:11):
their story of writing a book is going to become
an important story to people later on. So he probably
was fairly unconcerned about an article in a magazine. May's
Rudolph book, which is written in rhyming couplets, starts with
a nod to a visit from St. Nicholas, which was
already more than a century old when May started his
Rudolph project, So of course that starts, uh, you know,
(15:35):
twist the Night before Christmas. Rudolph's story begins twas the
day before Christmas, and all through the hills the reindeer
were playing, enjoying their spills. So if your recollection of
the Rudolph's story comes mostly from the song, which we
will get to, or the Rank and Bath Holiday special,
which we will also get to, you might be surprised
(15:57):
at some of the differences in May's story from what
you remember and the Montgomery word version. Rudolph does not
live at the North Pole with Santa. He's one of
the many creatures who hangs the stocking and waits excitedly
for Santa's visit. And in this version, Santa does take
to the skies with his standard team of eight reindeer,
(16:17):
and he gets in some trouble in that foggy climate,
getting quote tangled in treetops again and again, and he
even narrowly misses a collision with a plane. It's pretty exciting.
Santa starts getting pretty stressed quote through dark streets and houses.
Old Santa did poorly. He now picked the presence more slowly,
(16:37):
less surely. He really was worried for what would he
do if folks started waking before he was through? And
this original version of the story, Santa discovers Rudolph and
his magnificent glowing nos when he stops the reindeer's house.
As he gets into Rudolph's room to put gifts in
the stocking, he finds his job much easier. Quote the
(17:00):
lamp wasn't burning. The light came instead from something that
lay at the head of the bed. And there lay
But wait, now, what would you suppose the glowing You've
guessed it was Rudolph's red nose. So this room was easy.
This one little light. Let Santa pick quickly the gifts
that were right, So, of course you know what happens next,
(17:23):
Santa gets the great idea to bring Rudolph onto the team,
wakes him up and asked him if he'll do some work,
and the little reindeer that had been bullied and mocked
becomes a hero. And Rudolph's parents feel about this It's interesting, Um,
I was reading an interesting piece that kind of breaks down,
you know, some of the Rudolph stuff. People love to
(17:44):
analyze it of how very different this is from previous
versions of Christmas stories. Like the reindeer very anthropomorphized in
this version. I mean, Rudolph like writes notes, he talks,
he's you know, they sit at picnic tables at one point, Like,
it's very much like that. Whereas Santa, who is in
(18:05):
a lot of instances portrayed as almost um supernaturally powerful,
is really much more human in this version. So uh,
presumably Rudolph's parents were like, all right, sure, go with
this strange dude. I mean, we theoretically know him, but
that seems fine. So May's thirty two page book was
(18:28):
printed by Montgomery Ward in bulk for the Christmas season,
there were two point four million copies made to give
away to shoppers across the United States. It was advertised
with a big poster that read quote, get ready for
Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, the rollicking list, rip roaring ist,
(18:49):
riot provoking list Christmas giveaway. Your town has ever seen
why they would think that provoking a riot was like
a good way to draw customers. I have not a dent, sure,
but the store had a hit and they planned to
reprint may his book on subsequent years because it brought
in a lot of shoppers. And this is at a time.
(19:10):
Remember right, we're at the end of the Great Depression,
So the fact that a lot of people flocked to
stores and we're buying things was a big deal. A
nineteen forty memo to store managers read quote, everyone we
have checked with shares our belief that Rudolph in nineteen
forty will play a far bigger, more important role than
in nineteen thirty nine. But the start of World War
(19:33):
Two caused paper to be in high demand and short
supply and very expensive. That meant that Rudolph was not
printed again until nineteen forty six. Although the character remained
the central figure of the store's holiday campaigns. In nineteen
forty six, Montgomery Ward printed three point six million copies
and distributed them to eager customers. And in those years
(19:56):
between ninety six, Robert May had been busy. See he
actually published another children's book, Benny the Bunny Liked Beans,
which did okay but not gangbusters. It was not another Rudolph,
and he had remarried, this time to a woman named
Virginia Newton, who also worked for Montgomery Ward. The couple
had five children together, so Barbara got a whole bunch
(20:18):
of younger siblings. We mentioned earlier that May was brought
up in a secular Jewish family, but an interesting note
is that his own kids didn't know that he was
Jewish until much later in life. He converted to Catholicism
for Virginia, and there's some speculation that he may have
purposely downplayed being Jewish out of concern that it might
(20:39):
have been problematic for people to know that a secular
Jewish man had written a beloved Christmas story. I will
say he's definitely not the only Jewish person to have
written beloved Christmas stuff. No, there's an entire list you
could find of Jewish creators who contributed significantly to the
Lord of Christmas. May had, in that interim also been
(21:02):
given an honorary membership in ninety one to the National
Association of Authors and Journalists for his contribution to contemporary literature.
So while he may have not written the great American
novelist he had hoped, the writing community definitely considered him appear.
There is a moment in the Rudolph story that really
changes Robert May's life, and we are going to tell
(21:25):
you about that after a word from the sponsors who
keep stuff you missed in history class going sewell. Avery
was CEO of Montgomery Ward in and he turned the
rights to Rudolph over to Robert May, free and clear.
(21:47):
So even though May had created it, he was working
for Montgomery Ward at the time, so prior to this
he had no claims to that story. The exact logic
of why this handover happened isn't entire early known. One
theory is that the executives at the company just did
not see Rudolph as having any financial potential. They had
(22:07):
already given away millions of copies, so they thought that
if they did bother to for example, go to print
with a new addition and try to sell it. No
one was going to buy it, and that they would
have wasted their money on a production run. Another version
of the story goes that Bob May was still struggling
under the debt he had accrued during his first wife's illness,
and when he went to his boss to ask about
(22:28):
a possible bonus because of Rudolph's popularity, he ended up
getting the rights instead. The first version sounds a little
bit more realistic, although May was, to be clear, financially
strapped for years after Evelyn's death, and the Rudolph rights
got him out from under those debts. Uh. The medical
debt part of this story sounds incredibly familiar, Uh, Montgomery
(22:52):
Ward giving him the rights free and clear is like
literally the opposite of what we hear about with creators
all the time time. It's really mind blowing, like that
they were just like, that's cool, it's yours. What. So
there's also yet another version of this whole story that
May himself once told that he had been offered a
(23:14):
deal to record his Rudolph poem as a spoken word
record in nineteen forty six, but that he didn't own
the rights, so he had to turn that down. Then
colleagues at the company helped make the case that May
should be allowed to take the project because he hadn't
gotten any kind of bonus or renumeration for writing a
promotional book that drew huge crowds during the holiday shopping season.
(23:37):
And in this version, this is what led Suell Avery
to turn over the rights to the author. Whether that
was through a moment of kindness or just like poor
business strategy, we don't really know. A recording of Rudolph
the Red Nosed Reindeer was released in nineteen forty seven
(23:58):
to great success. Just as another shading to this story,
Suell Avery was considered to be really astute as a businessman,
like he had gotten Montgomery Ward, passed the depression, and
you know, was making a profit, so he wasn't a fool.
So that adds a whole other like factor in the
(24:18):
How exactly did he come to this decision? And though
Suell Avery might have thought that Rudolph was kind of
played out, May thought his little reindeer still had some magic,
and he was absolutely right. Although publishers were initially reluctant
to try to sell the poem as a hardcover book, since,
as we just mentioned, the market was full of free
copies already at that point, like six million copies were
(24:42):
up there, and they were like, there's not enough more
people that want this book that we will ever be
able to do this. But one publishing executive named Harry Elbaum,
who claimed that he liked Rudolph because he too was
teased about his nose, which was allegedly large, decided that
May's story was worth the risk. His publishing house put
out a one hundred thousand copy run of Rudolph the
(25:03):
Red Nose Reindeer in nineteen which sold out very quickly
and left consumers clamoring for more. By nineteen fifty, they
were putting out one million copies to meet demand for
the holiday season. But Rudolph's story also took another turn
in the late nineteen forties, and that was one that
would help catapult May's character to an even greater fame.
(25:25):
And to talk about what happens next, we have to
switch gears really quick to talk about another man, Johnny Marks. So.
Johnny Marks was born in Mount Vernon, New York, on
November nine, nineteen o nine, and as a child Johnny
attended New York's Ethical Culture Society School that was a
school popular with secular Jewish families. He went on to
Colgate University, where he majored in English, and then he
(25:47):
studied music after his undergrad even traveling to Paris to
do so. Although he didn't get any advanced degrees, he
was just kind of traveling and learning about music. He
had wanted to be a songwriter since he was just
a kid. By his mid twenties, Marx had carved out
a life for himself in music. He was writing songs,
although not making enough at it to support himself, so
(26:09):
he also gave voice lessons and worked as a producer
on radio shows. In ninety seven, after serving four years
in the Army as part of the twenty six Special
Services Company, which was largely made up of entertainers, Marx
got married. His bride was Margaret May, and Margaret was
Robert May's sister, and with a songwriter in the family,
(26:31):
Robert had another idea for Rudolph set the story to music.
Johnny got to work reworking the poem into the lyrics
that we know today. According to Johnny's account later in life,
he had already started making notes about Rudolph as a
possible song long before he ever joined the May family,
all the way back in nineteen thirty nine when the
(26:53):
story first came out. Yeah, Johnny told a lot of
different versions of Rudolph's stories through the years and has
kind of clouded the record in terms of what is
and is not the case regarding it, but just one
aspect of why it's a little bit tricky. But as
Johnny developed this song throughout, he was really confident in it.
(27:15):
There is no doubt about that Rudolph's story was already
a classic at this point, and he believed that this
song was just naturally going to be a hit. And
so Mark spent twenty five thousand dollars setting up a
music publishing company so that he could publish the musical
version of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer himself and have
complete control and ownership of it. Then he needed to
(27:36):
find a performer to sing it, and Marks, again certain
that the song would be big, was just not shy
at all about reaching out to some really big names.
He pitched it to Jeane Autrey, who did not like it,
and the story goes that fortunately Gina Autrey's wife loved it.
She cajoled him into recording it and releasing it as
(27:57):
a B side to the song If it doesn't snow
on Chris Us That account has been disputed as a
really good story, but maybe not the truth. But in
any case, this recording of Rudolph sold two million copies
in ninety nine and eventually fifteen million copies were sold. Yeah,
the the g notry part of this story could be
(28:18):
a whole other episode on its own about whether you know?
That becomes even more of like a strange legendary tale
where all of the different musicians that worked on it
have a different version of it, and like executives, record
label executives at Columbia have a different version of like
there are there's no pattern recognition, like there's there's no
(28:39):
This one and this one are both pretty similar. It's
all everybody's got their own, their own take on it.
And while Johnny Marks have been working on that Rudolph song,
an animated version of the story had also gone into
production at the Jam Handy Organization. Famed animation director Max
Fleischer directed this, and the original version included a title
card that read seasoned Greetings from montgomery Ward. Although May
(29:03):
owned the copyright at this point, Montgomery Ward had financed
the projects so it could still get the benefit of
advertising with Rudolph. Subsequent issues of this eight and a
half minute short had that card removed and the Johnny
Mark song included at the beginning and the end of
the cartoon. Also, this was part of one of the
funniest riff tracks live events of all times. Um, I
(29:27):
don't I don't think I was at this one. Oh
my goodness. I literally I laughed so hard that I
reached that point where my brain could not process my
brain and body could not process laughter. And I was
just silently crying in a joyous way, but like nothing
was actually coming out of me soundwise. In a December
(29:49):
article in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, there was a piece
about Rudolph, and the focus of it was how May's
kids were kind of a bit tired of Rudolph. Uh.
They were so tired of May talking about Rudolph all
the time that talking about it was forbidden at the
dinner table, even though it was that very character who
had enabled their father to support their family in a
(30:10):
pretty nice way. At that point, they were at the time,
especially irked the kids when someone called Bob May Rudolph's father,
because that implied that they had an animal for a sibling,
although later in life Barbara would in fact describe Rudolph
as her brother in interviews, and by this point probably
another point of contention for the kids. Robert May had
(30:31):
started putting an eight foot tall Rudolph on the family
lawn during the holidays each year so everyone would know
where the Rudolph people lived. In ninety one, managing Rudolph
had become a full time job for Robert May, and
he left Montgomery Ward to oversee the licensing of toys,
art lamps, school bags, salt and pepper shakers, and really
(30:55):
any novelties that featured his famous creation. He also wrote
several additional books featuring Rudolph, including Rudolph to the Rescue,
released in nineteen fifty one, Rudolph Shines Again, first published
in nineteen fifty four, and Rudolph's Second Christmas, which was
first released in nineteen seventy. Those titles have all been
(31:15):
published in various editions, sometimes bundled together. There were also
comic book adaptations, storybook versions, and many many reprintings of
the original story. By ninety eight, that kind of deluge
level revenue stream from Rudolph was slowing to a bit
of a trickle. So Bob May went back to Montgomery
(31:35):
Ward as a copywriter, and he actually stayed in that
job until he retired in nineteen seventy. In nineteen sixty four,
the Rank and Bass Holiday Special version of Rudolph the
Red Nose Reindeer debut that was bankrolled by General Electric.
This stop motion special was based on the Johnny Marks song.
(31:56):
The production team at Rank and Bast didn't actually have
a copy of the original poem. There's also a lot
of creative license taken with the story development. There's Hermie
the Elf and Yukon Cornelius and the Bumble and Clarice
and the Island of Misbit toys. They are all unique
to the special. They have nothing to do with the
(32:17):
original poem or the song, but I love them desperately
as a person who has a full size King Moon
Racer costume. Part of the reason that all of these
additional characters and plotlines were made was because the source
material was simply not long enough to make a special.
I think I read a stat where if someone had
(32:38):
just read the poem and it had been animated to
it would only have lasted about thirteen minutes. And like that,
this was an hour long block of programming. So if
they had not embellished the story, they would not have
had enough material for an hour long special, even when
you factor in commercials. And of course this is for
people our age. I think Tracy the Rootolf they know best. Uh,
(33:00):
that special continues to air regularly. It has its own
huge fan base, It has generated its own line of
merchandise and collectibles. I feel like we should also mention that,
like this came out before the concept of a holiday
special was really a thing, so it's one of the
projects that actually launched that idea. Like now we have,
(33:23):
you know, a kajillion There were a lot more ranking
Bass holiday shows. There were the um the Peanuts holiday specials.
There are now holiday specials associated with every big brand
that wasn't happening yet though in this in the early sixties,
they kind of were the forerunners in that space. Meanwhile,
I'm sitting here like, was it really an entire hour?
(33:45):
I know, I've watched it ten thousand times, and I'm
still like, it's a whole hour with commercials. Yes anyway.
In one Robert's wife, Virginia died. He got remarried to
her sister not long after. For this. In nineteen seventy five,
Robert L. May wrote the story of his creation of
Rudolph for the Gettysburg Times. This actually was syndicated and
(34:09):
ran in a lot of papers. I read it in
the Gettysburg Times edition. Uh. And he subtitled it Rudolph
and I were something alike. And at the end of
his account he wrote that children get to read a
story about quote a little deer who started out in
life as a loser, just as I did. But then
he goes on to explain that the things that held
Rudolph back became the exact things that gave him happiness
(34:31):
once he gave himself for others. May concluded this by writing, quote,
my reward is knowing that every year, when Christmas rolls around,
Rudolph still brings that message to millions, both young and old.
A year after he wrote that account, Robert May died.
That was on August eleventh, nineteen seventies six. That eight
foot rein deer that had graced his lawn every year
(34:54):
was given to Dartmouth, where it is still kept. Yeah,
they have an entire Robert May archive. They or you
can also find scans of the original hand lettered hand
drawn manuscript for the book that May and Gillan produced
in nineteen thirty nine. Those are pretty easily locatable online,
and the sketches will strike you if you've never seen
(35:14):
it before. Is pretty simple. They look, you know, kind
of like advanced crayon drawings, not something a kid would do,
but also not super refined, but they're very evocative. The
illustration depicting Rudolph crying because the other reindeer are cruel
to him is to me at least oddly affecting. It
takes up the top half of the page and the
text fills the lower half, but the way that the
(35:37):
art is drawn, Rudolph's tears fall all the way down
the page through the text section on the subject of
Montgomery Ward. They actually filed for chapter eleven in and
they closed in two thousand. In a quote given to
the Chicago Sunday Tribune for that nineteen fifty article that
we referenced earlier, Robert May summed up why he thought
(35:57):
that Rudolph had caught on with kids so instantly. Quote,
children are the little people, the underdogs of the world.
No matter how well adjusted they are, they just can't
help feeling pretty small and helpless alongside the adults that
tower around them. That's why children even more quickly than adults,
identify themselves with the underdog. In a story with Cinderella,
(36:18):
the ugly duckling Rudolph. When Rudolph eventually rides to glory
with Santa, each child rides with him and loves it.
Oh Rudolph. Yeah, I will say um that riff tracks
was the first time that I ever saw the original
version of the Rudolph story, and I was so like
(36:39):
confused initially, I'm like, did they take a lot of
liberties with this? No, that's the original version, fool the
way around. I'm not actually sure I've ever seen it. Um.
You can also find it online. Library of Congress has
the only, to the best of anyone's knowledge, version of
that original cut with the Montgomery Ward greeting card in it. Um.
(37:02):
You can also find the version that came out later
because this song had gotten so popular, where they cut
the song in at the front and the back. Um.
But yeah, it's very easy to find and it's a
really really beautiful um digitization of it. It's not like
a big Sometimes when you see old animation that's been digitized,
it's a little like Wincy because you can tell how
much the film degree before someone did it. This is
(37:24):
actually quite pristine. Rudolph, Rudolph, I have listener mail that
is about Maria Mozart or Marianna Mozart. This is from
our listener Angie, who writes, Hello, I was so happy
to listen to your recent episode about Maria on a Mozart.
I'm a children's librarian, Okay. I just had to shout
(37:46):
you out because I love that. Thank you uh and
was especially excited for this episode because one of America's
most beloved young adult authors, Marie Lou just wrote a
historical fiction novel about Maria Mozart and her brother's fantasy world,
entitled Kingdom of Back. She spoke at the San Diego
Library this spring, right before the COVID shutdown, and I
was so impressed with the amount of research she did
(38:07):
for her book. I bet you both would get along
with her so well. Strong research by women unite. Thank
you so much for your delightful podcast. Here are some
bonus pictures of my rescue cat Ali. She takes naps
next to me while I listened to your podcast as
I sew, And as a bonus, a pick of the
plumeria by my house that is still blooming in November.
This is a blatant attempt to entice you to come
to a show here after COVID times and enjoy San
(38:29):
Diego's beachside paradise. Warm regards, Happy Thanksgivings. We are recording
this actually Thanksgiving week, Angie. Thank you so much. Your
cat is adorable and I love that you listen and
so at the same time, are you mean, UM, I
don't need any cajoling to get to San Diego. I'll
go at the drop of a hat once this business
(38:50):
is over because I love that town. Um. And I
actually had read Marie Lou's book. Um. I didn't include
it as a source since it is fiction, but it
is really really good. And the Kingdom of Back is
the secret kingdom we referenced in that that UM episode
that Maria, Anna and Vokang kind of invented together. That
(39:11):
was their little getaway fantasy play world. So thank you
so much for writing about that. Uh. And I think
people should check that out. I love a fiction story
based on historical people. Maybe you will too. Uh. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History podcast at i heeart radio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as missed
in History and if you would like to subscribe to
the podcast and haven't yet, you can do that so
(39:33):
easily on the I heart radio app, at Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I think
it's safe to say that Rudolph is a beloved holiday
character for a lot of folks. For sure. Yeah, I
(00:22):
don't think I'm really like over steep first stepping. Uh,
you know, common opinion at that point. Most of us,
at this point grew up with the story of this
sweet little reindeer that was picked on by his peers
only to be the triumphant hero who saves Christmas. But
Rudolph is kind of unique in that he became part
of Christmas tradition almost the moment he was introduced in
(00:44):
nine nine. And there are a lot of variations in
the story of Rudolph's origins. This is largely because the
author of the Rudolph story gave a lot of interviews
throughout his life, like over the course of forty years,
and sometimes his narrative shifted a little bit, occasionally contradicting
other versions that he told. There's also another related collaborator
(01:06):
in the Rudolph phenomenon who also gave conflicting accounts, and
because Rudolph's intense popularity was not exactly anticipated, at least
not at the level it achieved. It wasn't as though
this project was being documented and notated as the initial
story was being created. So all of this, you know,
kind of narrative shifting and conflicting accounts, it's really pretty normal.
(01:28):
And today we're going to talk about Robert L. May
and how he created Rudolph, how his reindeer character became
a phenomenon. Will also talk about his collaboration with his
brother in law and how this story became an instant classic.
And we just want to offer a quick disclaimer here
if you are maybe a parent listening with a younger
history fan, this isn't really so much like a fun
(01:51):
Christmas story about uh, you know, the fictional characters. It's
very much real world story stuff going on. Some of
it is um, definitely sad uh and we don't you know,
I wanna wanna make anybody have a unhappy association with
So if you do like to listen with younger listeners,
(02:14):
I would encourage maybe give it a listen first, see
if it's at a level that you're comfortable sharing with them,
and then uh, we're off to the races. But we're
going to jump right into the story. The early life
of Robert L. May is just not particularly well documented.
We know he was born in nineteen o five and
also grew up in New Rochelle, New York, which is
the suburb made famous by the Dick Van Dyke Show. Weirdly,
(02:37):
I've just never associated it with I've associated it with
the the Amtrak train that goes from here to New
York City. Well you made I mean, you're you're a
little bit too young, right for when the Dick Vandyke
Show was super popular. Yeah, I saw it in syndication,
one of these things. It was always on and rerint
(02:57):
somewhere anyway, not in Portant. His parents were well off.
His father, Milton, was from Georgia and owned a lumber business,
and while the family was Jewish, they were also secular.
Robert attended college at Dartmouth, but a few years after
he completed school in nine the stock market crash of
nine nine happened, followed of course by the Great Depression,
(03:20):
and in the course of all of this, the May
family lost a lot of their money. His younger siblings
were not able to attend college. Because of the family's
financial situation and his early career, May worked in copy
and advertising jobs for a series of department stores, including
Macy's and Riches. He got married to a woman named
Evelyn Hayman on November twenty nine. The two of them
(03:43):
had a daughter named Barbara in five. By that point
they had moved to Chicago so Robert could take a
new job working as a copywriter for Montgomery Ward. And
to be very clear, Bob May was really good at
this job. There was a profile that came out about
him as his work started to gain pretty wide recognition
later on, and it included this description quote words are
(04:08):
maize stock in trade, and people who work with him
will tell you, only too willingly, how clever he is
in the use of words, not only any humorous use,
but in making them express sympathy, pathos, admiration as well
as darn good advertising. In early January nine, Robert L.
May was headed into work. He was not feeling particularly festive,
(04:31):
not looking forward to the new year. Later on, he
recalled being thankful as he went into his job. The
holiday decorations in the streets of Chicago had all been
taken down because he was not in the mood for them,
and May's lack of enthusiasm at this point was not
because he was returning to work after the holidays. His
family was going through an incredibly difficult time. His wife, Evelyn,
(04:56):
was going through a long series of cancer treatments after
having been die agnosed in nineteen thirty seven, and over
the two years since her diagnosis, the cost of her
care had really put him in a financially precurious state. Additionally,
he heard two young men in the elevator who were
talking about their plans for the year, and May was
struck with this sense of just being a middle aged underachiever.
(05:19):
He had gotten into writing to become a novelist, and
now he found himself quote at age thirty five, still
grinding out catalog copy instead of writing the Great American
novel as I once hoped, I was describing men's white shirts. Robert,
who went by Bob, got a call from an admin
assistant saying that he needed to report to his boss's office,
(05:42):
and at this point Bob just thought this was some
other dull and uninspiring work assignment. But the assignment he
was about to receive was anything but his standard copy requests.
The story, as May told it went this way. His
department head H. G. McDonald said, quote, Bob, I've got
an idea. For years, our stores have been buying those
(06:03):
little Christmas giveaway coloring books from local peddlers. I think
we can save a lot of money if we create
one ourselves. Could you come up with a better booklet
we could use. May's supervisor went on to tell him
that it should have an animal as the main character,
and mentioned that it should be something like Ferdinand the Bull.
(06:23):
For context, just in case you are not familiar with
that story. The story of Ferdinand, written by Monroe Leaf,
had come out three years earlier and it was a
huge hit. And this tells the story of a young
bull named Ferdinand who has no interest in bullfights. He
doesn't want to fight with other bulls, he doesn't want
to butt heads with them to prove who's stronger, and
he cannot be provoked by matadors. Instead, he just loves
(06:48):
to smell flowers. And by the time May got his assignment,
Ferdinand was one of the most popular books in the
United States, so it's really not surprising that his boss
would reference the pacifist bovine as a model. This is
definitely still something that people were reading when I was
a kid. Yeah. Same. The reason that a catalog copywriter
(07:09):
was chapped for this project was apparently because May had
performed some comedic songs at the company holiday party a
couple of years earlier, and they'd become popular enough that
he was asked to write similar songs for other company events.
So his bosses knew that he could write in verse
using clever word play. As Bob May ruminated on this
(07:29):
assignment later that evening, he started thinking both about Christmas
appropriate animals and the kinds of animals that his daughter,
Barbara liked. Barbara, who was four at this point, loved
the deer at the zoo, so he quickly decided that
a reindeer was going to be the best protagonist. Reindeer
were definitely strongly associated with Christmas already by this point,
(07:51):
so this was a logical step. And the next step
in May's development of the idea was to try to
think of a way to make the story didactic. He
tried to come up with a lesson that this reindeer
could teach to kids. He knew he wanted it to
be an underdog story, According to his account, he thought
about the fact that the ultimate dream for a reindeer
(08:12):
would be to pull Santa sleigh, and in some versions
of the story, May would also mention that he was
inspired by the Hans Christian Anderson story of the ugly
duckling a glance out the window as he was having
all of these thoughts gave May the inspiration for the
key trait that would become forever associated with the name
Rudolph in pop culture. He had noticed that fog had
(08:34):
rolled into the city from Lake Michigan, and his mind
wandered to the story he had been working on, and
when he started wondering exactly how Santa might manage traveling
via flying sleigh in low visibility fog, the idea, he
always said, kind of came to him like a flash.
Rudolph would have a glowing nose that could act as
a floodlight and lead Santa through fog. Bob May was
(08:57):
excited about this idea, somebody who writes, sometimes, I know
what that feels like. His boss was not as receptive
as he hoped, though. When he pitched this at work
the next morning, the reaction was lukewarm at best. May
would later say that the exact reaction was, for gosh sakes, Bob,
(09:17):
can't you do better than that? Uh? Years later, McDonald's wife, Bernice,
said that the reason he was initially put off was
because of the association between red noses and drunkenness. I
could see that logic, sure, um, but this is also
a good moment to think about, like for anybody that
does creative things. I've written stuff, I make various things,
(09:41):
and there are times when you think you put it
together and someone else seas it goes huh. That doesn't
always mean it's not great. So of course we know
that that is not the end of Rudolph. And after
we take a quick sponsor break, we're going to see
how Robert May continued to champion his project and his
little reindeer even after his boss told him to come
(10:02):
up with something else. So we mentioned before the break
that Bob May's boss was not into the Rudolph story.
But thankfully May, who may or may not have already
settled on that name, Rudolph accounts very about it, was
(10:23):
already attached though, to both the character and the story.
So next he turned his creative thinking to how he
could convince his boss that this was really something they
should do, and May decided that if he could just
show him a visual of what he was thinking of,
it might convince him to approve the project to move forward.
The help with this plan, May approached Denver Gillen, who
(10:47):
was a friend of his from the company's art department.
He explained to Denver what the Rudolph story was and
that he needed help convincing higher ups that this is
a good idea. So he asked him, Denver, could you
draw a deer with a big red nos and still
make him look appealing. They struck up a plan to
work on a visual pitch over the weekend, so that
(11:08):
Saturday morning, May, Gillen and May's daughter Barbara, We're all
at the Lincoln Park Zoo looking at the deer, and
Denver made several sketches as they observed the animals, and
then he kind of reworked those into sketches of characters,
and by the time the day ended, May and Gillen
felt like they had something good enough to bring to
work on Monday and asked the bosses to revisit the
(11:30):
Rudolph idea. We've got to give credit to the boss.
He reversed his previous decision after he saw this and
understood the story more fully, saying, quote, Bob, forget what
I said. Put the story into finish form. Yeah, not
all bosses are willing to shift their their stands on things.
So I kind of love that. He was like, no,
(11:53):
I get it, now, this is great. I was wrong. Cool.
Over the next several months, May and Gillen worked on
the project, and the was something that was like they
were still having to do their day jobs. It wasn't
like their plates had been cleared to to only work
on this. So it was a little bit of an
evening since weekends situation. But as this really pretty exciting
(12:13):
opportunity to do something more than right about men's shirts
offered me the creative outlet he had been longing for,
his personal life at this time was not so joyous.
So Bob was working on Rudolph in the evenings and
in his spare time at work, but his wife, Evelyn's
condition was growing more and more grave, and in July
she died, and that left Bob a widower with a
(12:35):
small child. When May returned to work after the loss
of his wife, his boss made it clear that he
did not have to keep working on this Rudolph project,
saying quote, I can understand you're not wanting to go
on with the kid's book. Give me what you've got
and I'll let someone else finish it. But May did
not want to leave this project, and almost four decades later,
when recounting the story, he wrote, quote, but I needed
(12:58):
Rudolph now more than ever. Gratefully, I buried myself in
the writing. May wrote through what must have been just
the height of his grief, and he finished the story
a month after Evelyn died, that was in August of
ninety nine. He shared the story with his in laws,
who were staying with him at the time, and with
his daughter, and their reaction told him that he had
(13:20):
created something really special. He had run some of his
work by Barbara as he worked, and she mentioned in
an interview with NPR in that she had responded negatively
to the words stomach at one point because she thought
that was ikey that got switched to tummy when it
came to describing Santa's shaking belly. I can only imagine,
(13:42):
like a four year old copy editor, that's gross. Change
that word. They're so blunt. A quick note here is
that there is actually a vastly different version of this
origin story, which, like the one we just recounted, kind
of comes from Robert el May himself. It was in
an issue of Coronet Magazine, from an in debt article.
(14:07):
May told the journalist writing the piece that he wrote
Rudolph to comfort his daughter because of Evelyn's illness, and
that his boss at Montgomery Ward heard about the story
and decided to use it for the promotional book. So
whether this was a matter of misinterpretation on the interviewer's
part or May just punching up the story, we don't
a hundred percent no. But that's not the only aspect
(14:29):
of this different tale. There was also a friend of
May's in the mix, Stanley Frankel, who had pitched the
story to Coronet and who might have been the source
of some of this mismatching information, and lore May himself
referred back to the article at various times, though, so
he knew about that version, and he didn't really make
any effort to denounce it. As a consequence, both of
(14:51):
these origin stories persist, although the job assignment version is
actually corroborated. This is one of those things where I
wonder if he just had no sense of the fact
that people would want to look at this as a
part of history. And he's like, man, it's fine, yeah,
it seems pretty no one. No one probably thinks they're like, uh,
(15:11):
their story of writing a book is going to become
an important story to people later on. So he probably
was fairly unconcerned about an article in a magazine. May's
Rudolph book, which is written in rhyming couplets, starts with
a nod to a visit from St. Nicholas, which was
already more than a century old when May started his
Rudolph project, So of course that starts, uh, you know,
(15:35):
twist the Night before Christmas. Rudolph's story begins twas the
day before Christmas, and all through the hills the reindeer
were playing, enjoying their spills. So if your recollection of
the Rudolph's story comes mostly from the song, which we
will get to, or the Rank and Bath Holiday special,
which we will also get to, you might be surprised
(15:57):
at some of the differences in May's story from what
you remember and the Montgomery word version. Rudolph does not
live at the North Pole with Santa. He's one of
the many creatures who hangs the stocking and waits excitedly
for Santa's visit. And in this version, Santa does take
to the skies with his standard team of eight reindeer,
(16:17):
and he gets in some trouble in that foggy climate,
getting quote tangled in treetops again and again, and he
even narrowly misses a collision with a plane. It's pretty exciting.
Santa starts getting pretty stressed quote through dark streets and houses.
Old Santa did poorly. He now picked the presence more slowly,
(16:37):
less surely. He really was worried for what would he
do if folks started waking before he was through? And
this original version of the story, Santa discovers Rudolph and
his magnificent glowing nos when he stops the reindeer's house.
As he gets into Rudolph's room to put gifts in
the stocking, he finds his job much easier. Quote the
(17:00):
lamp wasn't burning. The light came instead from something that
lay at the head of the bed. And there lay
But wait, now, what would you suppose the glowing You've
guessed it was Rudolph's red nose. So this room was easy.
This one little light. Let Santa pick quickly the gifts
that were right, So, of course you know what happens next,
(17:23):
Santa gets the great idea to bring Rudolph onto the team,
wakes him up and asked him if he'll do some work,
and the little reindeer that had been bullied and mocked
becomes a hero. And Rudolph's parents feel about this It's interesting, Um,
I was reading an interesting piece that kind of breaks down,
you know, some of the Rudolph stuff. People love to
(17:44):
analyze it of how very different this is from previous
versions of Christmas stories. Like the reindeer very anthropomorphized in
this version. I mean, Rudolph like writes notes, he talks,
he's you know, they sit at picnic tables at one point, Like,
it's very much like that. Whereas Santa, who is in
(18:05):
a lot of instances portrayed as almost um supernaturally powerful,
is really much more human in this version. So uh,
presumably Rudolph's parents were like, all right, sure, go with
this strange dude. I mean, we theoretically know him, but
that seems fine. So May's thirty two page book was
(18:28):
printed by Montgomery Ward in bulk for the Christmas season,
there were two point four million copies made to give
away to shoppers across the United States. It was advertised
with a big poster that read quote, get ready for
Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, the rollicking list, rip roaring ist,
(18:49):
riot provoking list Christmas giveaway. Your town has ever seen
why they would think that provoking a riot was like
a good way to draw customers. I have not a dent, sure,
but the store had a hit and they planned to
reprint may his book on subsequent years because it brought
in a lot of shoppers. And this is at a time.
(19:10):
Remember right, we're at the end of the Great Depression,
So the fact that a lot of people flocked to
stores and we're buying things was a big deal. A
nineteen forty memo to store managers read quote, everyone we
have checked with shares our belief that Rudolph in nineteen
forty will play a far bigger, more important role than
in nineteen thirty nine. But the start of World War
(19:33):
Two caused paper to be in high demand and short
supply and very expensive. That meant that Rudolph was not
printed again until nineteen forty six. Although the character remained
the central figure of the store's holiday campaigns. In nineteen
forty six, Montgomery Ward printed three point six million copies
and distributed them to eager customers. And in those years
(19:56):
between ninety six, Robert May had been busy. See he
actually published another children's book, Benny the Bunny Liked Beans,
which did okay but not gangbusters. It was not another Rudolph,
and he had remarried, this time to a woman named
Virginia Newton, who also worked for Montgomery Ward. The couple
had five children together, so Barbara got a whole bunch
(20:18):
of younger siblings. We mentioned earlier that May was brought
up in a secular Jewish family, but an interesting note
is that his own kids didn't know that he was
Jewish until much later in life. He converted to Catholicism
for Virginia, and there's some speculation that he may have
purposely downplayed being Jewish out of concern that it might
(20:39):
have been problematic for people to know that a secular
Jewish man had written a beloved Christmas story. I will
say he's definitely not the only Jewish person to have
written beloved Christmas stuff. No, there's an entire list you
could find of Jewish creators who contributed significantly to the
Lord of Christmas. May had, in that interim also been
(21:02):
given an honorary membership in ninety one to the National
Association of Authors and Journalists for his contribution to contemporary literature.
So while he may have not written the great American
novelist he had hoped, the writing community definitely considered him appear.
There is a moment in the Rudolph story that really
changes Robert May's life, and we are going to tell
(21:25):
you about that after a word from the sponsors who
keep stuff you missed in history class going sewell. Avery
was CEO of Montgomery Ward in and he turned the
rights to Rudolph over to Robert May, free and clear.
(21:47):
So even though May had created it, he was working
for Montgomery Ward at the time, so prior to this
he had no claims to that story. The exact logic
of why this handover happened isn't entire early known. One
theory is that the executives at the company just did
not see Rudolph as having any financial potential. They had
(22:07):
already given away millions of copies, so they thought that
if they did bother to for example, go to print
with a new addition and try to sell it. No
one was going to buy it, and that they would
have wasted their money on a production run. Another version
of the story goes that Bob May was still struggling
under the debt he had accrued during his first wife's illness,
and when he went to his boss to ask about
(22:28):
a possible bonus because of Rudolph's popularity, he ended up
getting the rights instead. The first version sounds a little
bit more realistic, although May was, to be clear, financially
strapped for years after Evelyn's death, and the Rudolph rights
got him out from under those debts. Uh. The medical
debt part of this story sounds incredibly familiar, Uh, Montgomery
(22:52):
Ward giving him the rights free and clear is like
literally the opposite of what we hear about with creators
all the time time. It's really mind blowing, like that
they were just like, that's cool, it's yours. What. So
there's also yet another version of this whole story that
May himself once told that he had been offered a
(23:14):
deal to record his Rudolph poem as a spoken word
record in nineteen forty six, but that he didn't own
the rights, so he had to turn that down. Then
colleagues at the company helped make the case that May
should be allowed to take the project because he hadn't
gotten any kind of bonus or renumeration for writing a
promotional book that drew huge crowds during the holiday shopping season.
(23:37):
And in this version, this is what led Suell Avery
to turn over the rights to the author. Whether that
was through a moment of kindness or just like poor
business strategy, we don't really know. A recording of Rudolph
the Red Nosed Reindeer was released in nineteen forty seven
(23:58):
to great success. Just as another shading to this story,
Suell Avery was considered to be really astute as a businessman,
like he had gotten Montgomery Ward, passed the depression, and
you know, was making a profit, so he wasn't a fool.
So that adds a whole other like factor in the
(24:18):
How exactly did he come to this decision? And though
Suell Avery might have thought that Rudolph was kind of
played out, May thought his little reindeer still had some magic,
and he was absolutely right. Although publishers were initially reluctant
to try to sell the poem as a hardcover book, since,
as we just mentioned, the market was full of free
copies already at that point, like six million copies were
(24:42):
up there, and they were like, there's not enough more
people that want this book that we will ever be
able to do this. But one publishing executive named Harry Elbaum,
who claimed that he liked Rudolph because he too was
teased about his nose, which was allegedly large, decided that
May's story was worth the risk. His publishing house put
out a one hundred thousand copy run of Rudolph the
(25:03):
Red Nose Reindeer in nineteen which sold out very quickly
and left consumers clamoring for more. By nineteen fifty, they
were putting out one million copies to meet demand for
the holiday season. But Rudolph's story also took another turn
in the late nineteen forties, and that was one that
would help catapult May's character to an even greater fame.
(25:25):
And to talk about what happens next, we have to
switch gears really quick to talk about another man, Johnny Marks. So.
Johnny Marks was born in Mount Vernon, New York, on
November nine, nineteen o nine, and as a child Johnny
attended New York's Ethical Culture Society School that was a
school popular with secular Jewish families. He went on to
Colgate University, where he majored in English, and then he
(25:47):
studied music after his undergrad even traveling to Paris to
do so. Although he didn't get any advanced degrees, he
was just kind of traveling and learning about music. He
had wanted to be a songwriter since he was just
a kid. By his mid twenties, Marx had carved out
a life for himself in music. He was writing songs,
although not making enough at it to support himself, so
(26:09):
he also gave voice lessons and worked as a producer
on radio shows. In ninety seven, after serving four years
in the Army as part of the twenty six Special
Services Company, which was largely made up of entertainers, Marx
got married. His bride was Margaret May, and Margaret was
Robert May's sister, and with a songwriter in the family,
(26:31):
Robert had another idea for Rudolph set the story to music.
Johnny got to work reworking the poem into the lyrics
that we know today. According to Johnny's account later in life,
he had already started making notes about Rudolph as a
possible song long before he ever joined the May family,
all the way back in nineteen thirty nine when the
(26:53):
story first came out. Yeah, Johnny told a lot of
different versions of Rudolph's stories through the years and has
kind of clouded the record in terms of what is
and is not the case regarding it, but just one
aspect of why it's a little bit tricky. But as
Johnny developed this song throughout, he was really confident in it.
(27:15):
There is no doubt about that Rudolph's story was already
a classic at this point, and he believed that this
song was just naturally going to be a hit. And
so Mark spent twenty five thousand dollars setting up a
music publishing company so that he could publish the musical
version of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer himself and have
complete control and ownership of it. Then he needed to
(27:36):
find a performer to sing it, and Marks, again certain
that the song would be big, was just not shy
at all about reaching out to some really big names.
He pitched it to Jeane Autrey, who did not like it,
and the story goes that fortunately Gina Autrey's wife loved it.
She cajoled him into recording it and releasing it as
(27:57):
a B side to the song If it doesn't snow
on Chris Us That account has been disputed as a
really good story, but maybe not the truth. But in
any case, this recording of Rudolph sold two million copies
in ninety nine and eventually fifteen million copies were sold. Yeah,
the the g notry part of this story could be
(28:18):
a whole other episode on its own about whether you know?
That becomes even more of like a strange legendary tale
where all of the different musicians that worked on it
have a different version of it, and like executives, record
label executives at Columbia have a different version of like
there are there's no pattern recognition, like there's there's no
(28:39):
This one and this one are both pretty similar. It's
all everybody's got their own, their own take on it.
And while Johnny Marks have been working on that Rudolph song,
an animated version of the story had also gone into
production at the Jam Handy Organization. Famed animation director Max
Fleischer directed this, and the original version included a title
card that read seasoned Greetings from montgomery Ward. Although May
(29:03):
owned the copyright at this point, Montgomery Ward had financed
the projects so it could still get the benefit of
advertising with Rudolph. Subsequent issues of this eight and a
half minute short had that card removed and the Johnny
Mark song included at the beginning and the end of
the cartoon. Also, this was part of one of the
funniest riff tracks live events of all times. Um, I
(29:27):
don't I don't think I was at this one. Oh
my goodness. I literally I laughed so hard that I
reached that point where my brain could not process my
brain and body could not process laughter. And I was
just silently crying in a joyous way, but like nothing
was actually coming out of me soundwise. In a December
(29:49):
article in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, there was a piece
about Rudolph, and the focus of it was how May's
kids were kind of a bit tired of Rudolph. Uh.
They were so tired of May talking about Rudolph all
the time that talking about it was forbidden at the
dinner table, even though it was that very character who
had enabled their father to support their family in a
(30:10):
pretty nice way. At that point, they were at the time,
especially irked the kids when someone called Bob May Rudolph's father,
because that implied that they had an animal for a sibling,
although later in life Barbara would in fact describe Rudolph
as her brother in interviews, and by this point probably
another point of contention for the kids. Robert May had
(30:31):
started putting an eight foot tall Rudolph on the family
lawn during the holidays each year so everyone would know
where the Rudolph people lived. In ninety one, managing Rudolph
had become a full time job for Robert May, and
he left Montgomery Ward to oversee the licensing of toys,
art lamps, school bags, salt and pepper shakers, and really
(30:55):
any novelties that featured his famous creation. He also wrote
several additional books featuring Rudolph, including Rudolph to the Rescue,
released in nineteen fifty one, Rudolph Shines Again, first published
in nineteen fifty four, and Rudolph's Second Christmas, which was
first released in nineteen seventy. Those titles have all been
(31:15):
published in various editions, sometimes bundled together. There were also
comic book adaptations, storybook versions, and many many reprintings of
the original story. By ninety eight, that kind of deluge
level revenue stream from Rudolph was slowing to a bit
of a trickle. So Bob May went back to Montgomery
(31:35):
Ward as a copywriter, and he actually stayed in that
job until he retired in nineteen seventy. In nineteen sixty four,
the Rank and Bass Holiday Special version of Rudolph the
Red Nose Reindeer debut that was bankrolled by General Electric.
This stop motion special was based on the Johnny Marks song.
(31:56):
The production team at Rank and Bast didn't actually have
a copy of the original poem. There's also a lot
of creative license taken with the story development. There's Hermie
the Elf and Yukon Cornelius and the Bumble and Clarice
and the Island of Misbit toys. They are all unique
to the special. They have nothing to do with the
(32:17):
original poem or the song, but I love them desperately
as a person who has a full size King Moon
Racer costume. Part of the reason that all of these
additional characters and plotlines were made was because the source
material was simply not long enough to make a special.
I think I read a stat where if someone had
(32:38):
just read the poem and it had been animated to
it would only have lasted about thirteen minutes. And like that,
this was an hour long block of programming. So if
they had not embellished the story, they would not have
had enough material for an hour long special, even when
you factor in commercials. And of course this is for
people our age. I think Tracy the Rootolf they know best. Uh,
(33:00):
that special continues to air regularly. It has its own
huge fan base, It has generated its own line of
merchandise and collectibles. I feel like we should also mention that,
like this came out before the concept of a holiday
special was really a thing, so it's one of the
projects that actually launched that idea. Like now we have,
(33:23):
you know, a kajillion There were a lot more ranking
Bass holiday shows. There were the um the Peanuts holiday specials.
There are now holiday specials associated with every big brand
that wasn't happening yet though in this in the early sixties,
they kind of were the forerunners in that space. Meanwhile,
I'm sitting here like, was it really an entire hour?
(33:45):
I know, I've watched it ten thousand times, and I'm
still like, it's a whole hour with commercials. Yes anyway.
In one Robert's wife, Virginia died. He got remarried to
her sister not long after. For this. In nineteen seventy five,
Robert L. May wrote the story of his creation of
Rudolph for the Gettysburg Times. This actually was syndicated and
(34:09):
ran in a lot of papers. I read it in
the Gettysburg Times edition. Uh. And he subtitled it Rudolph
and I were something alike. And at the end of
his account he wrote that children get to read a
story about quote a little deer who started out in
life as a loser, just as I did. But then
he goes on to explain that the things that held
Rudolph back became the exact things that gave him happiness
(34:31):
once he gave himself for others. May concluded this by writing, quote,
my reward is knowing that every year, when Christmas rolls around,
Rudolph still brings that message to millions, both young and old.
A year after he wrote that account, Robert May died.
That was on August eleventh, nineteen seventies six. That eight
foot rein deer that had graced his lawn every year
(34:54):
was given to Dartmouth, where it is still kept. Yeah,
they have an entire Robert May archive. They or you
can also find scans of the original hand lettered hand
drawn manuscript for the book that May and Gillan produced
in nineteen thirty nine. Those are pretty easily locatable online,
and the sketches will strike you if you've never seen
(35:14):
it before. Is pretty simple. They look, you know, kind
of like advanced crayon drawings, not something a kid would do,
but also not super refined, but they're very evocative. The
illustration depicting Rudolph crying because the other reindeer are cruel
to him is to me at least oddly affecting. It
takes up the top half of the page and the
text fills the lower half, but the way that the
(35:37):
art is drawn, Rudolph's tears fall all the way down
the page through the text section on the subject of
Montgomery Ward. They actually filed for chapter eleven in and
they closed in two thousand. In a quote given to
the Chicago Sunday Tribune for that nineteen fifty article that
we referenced earlier, Robert May summed up why he thought
(35:57):
that Rudolph had caught on with kids so instantly. Quote,
children are the little people, the underdogs of the world.
No matter how well adjusted they are, they just can't
help feeling pretty small and helpless alongside the adults that
tower around them. That's why children even more quickly than adults,
identify themselves with the underdog. In a story with Cinderella,
(36:18):
the ugly duckling Rudolph. When Rudolph eventually rides to glory
with Santa, each child rides with him and loves it.
Oh Rudolph. Yeah, I will say um that riff tracks
was the first time that I ever saw the original
version of the Rudolph story, and I was so like
(36:39):
confused initially, I'm like, did they take a lot of
liberties with this? No, that's the original version, fool the
way around. I'm not actually sure I've ever seen it. Um.
You can also find it online. Library of Congress has
the only, to the best of anyone's knowledge, version of
that original cut with the Montgomery Ward greeting card in it. Um.
(37:02):
You can also find the version that came out later
because this song had gotten so popular, where they cut
the song in at the front and the back. Um.
But yeah, it's very easy to find and it's a
really really beautiful um digitization of it. It's not like
a big Sometimes when you see old animation that's been digitized,
it's a little like Wincy because you can tell how
much the film degree before someone did it. This is
(37:24):
actually quite pristine. Rudolph, Rudolph, I have listener mail that
is about Maria Mozart or Marianna Mozart. This is from
our listener Angie, who writes, Hello, I was so happy
to listen to your recent episode about Maria on a Mozart.
I'm a children's librarian, Okay. I just had to shout
(37:46):
you out because I love that. Thank you uh and
was especially excited for this episode because one of America's
most beloved young adult authors, Marie Lou just wrote a
historical fiction novel about Maria Mozart and her brother's fantasy world,
entitled Kingdom of Back. She spoke at the San Diego
Library this spring, right before the COVID shutdown, and I
was so impressed with the amount of research she did
(38:07):
for her book. I bet you both would get along
with her so well. Strong research by women unite. Thank
you so much for your delightful podcast. Here are some
bonus pictures of my rescue cat Ali. She takes naps
next to me while I listened to your podcast as
I sew, And as a bonus, a pick of the
plumeria by my house that is still blooming in November.
This is a blatant attempt to entice you to come
to a show here after COVID times and enjoy San
(38:29):
Diego's beachside paradise. Warm regards, Happy Thanksgivings. We are recording
this actually Thanksgiving week, Angie. Thank you so much. Your
cat is adorable and I love that you listen and
so at the same time, are you mean, UM, I
don't need any cajoling to get to San Diego. I'll
go at the drop of a hat once this business
(38:50):
is over because I love that town. Um. And I
actually had read Marie Lou's book. Um. I didn't include
it as a source since it is fiction, but it
is really really good. And the Kingdom of Back is
the secret kingdom we referenced in that that UM episode
that Maria, Anna and Vokang kind of invented together. That
(39:11):
was their little getaway fantasy play world. So thank you
so much for writing about that. Uh. And I think
people should check that out. I love a fiction story
based on historical people. Maybe you will too. Uh. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History podcast at i heeart radio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as missed
in History and if you would like to subscribe to
the podcast and haven't yet, you can do that so
(39:33):
easily on the I heart radio app, at Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
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