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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.