Fr Hedwig Lewis SJ –
The popular song at Christmastide, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer seems to have always been an essential part of our season’s folklore. But Rudolph is a decidedly a very modern invention whose creation can be traced to a specific time and person.
Montgomery Ward, based in Chicago, USA, is an age-old chain of Department Stores Company. It has been their practice from the early 1900s to buy and give away coloring books to shoppers as a promotional gimmick for Christmas every year. They wanted to create their own booklet, so in June 1939, the manager of the Montgomery Ward catalog company asked his employee, 34-year-old Robert L. May, a copywriter, to create their own children’s booklet to be given away to all their customer’s children as they visited the store’s Santa Claus. May was known to enjoy writing children’s stories and limericks.
Winning ways
May began working on the idea but found it rather difficult to concentrate on his writing. He was worried about his cancer-stricken wife and his four-year-old daughter, Barbara. He was haunted by memories of his own childhood when he was a often taunted for being shy, small, and slight, and the youngest in his class at school. As May revealed in the January 1975 issue of Guideposts: “It seemed I’d always been a loser… As a child I’d always been the smallest in the class. Frail, poorly coordinated, I was never asked to join the school teams. After mustering enough courage to ask a girl to dance, I’d catch her winking over my shoulder at a taller boy to get him to cut in.”
With these distressing thoughts in his mind, May decided to write a story which would bring comfort to all the other children who felt left out and different from their peers. However, though the plot would have an underdog for the main character, he would give it a triumphant ending
The story
It was suggested that he write about a reindeer, using the familiar “Ugly Duckling” format for his story. May put a lot of thought into the suggestion and came up with the character of a shy, awkward little reindeer, who possessed a kind heart but ostracized by his peers because of his physical abnormality – a glowing red nose.
He first gave his ‘hero’ the name Rollo, but then realised that the name had too cheerful and carefree a ring to it and did not suit a character that was a misfit in society. His next choice was ‘Reginald – but that sounded too British. He finally settled on Rudolph. He then proceeded to write Rudolph’s story in verse, as a series of rhyming couplets, testing it out on four-year-old Barbara as he went along. Barbara, who was absolutely delighted with it. His boss, however, was less than thrilled. He felt that a story about a red nose would remind people too much of drinking and drunkards. So May took Denver Gillen, an artist from Montgomery Ward’s art department to the Lincoln Park Zoo to sketch some deer. The artist’s illustrations of a red-nosed reindeer were so cute; May’s boss approved the story. Rudolph first appeared in a 32-page booklet entitled Rudolf the Red-Nose Reindeer, beautifully illustrated with crayon drawings by Gillen. Santas at Montgomery Ward stores gave away 2.4 million copies of the booklet during the 1939 Christmas season.”
Revival
During World War II, Rudolph went into hibernation, but in 1946, Montgomery Ward again published the book. Although wartime paper shortages curtailed printing for the next several years, the end of 1946 had given a total of six million copies.
After the war there was a tremendous demand for licensing the Rudolph character. However, Montgomery Ward held the copyright, since May had created the story as an employee of their’s, and he received no royalties. Deeply in debt from the medical bills resulting from his wife’s terminal illness (she died about the time May created Rudolph), May persuaded Montgomery Ward’s corporate president, Sewell Avery, to turn the copyright over to him in January 1947. In an act of great generosity, Montgomery Ward gave Rudolph’s copyrights to Bob May, with the understanding that Ward’s would forever remain Rudolph’s permanent home during the Christmas season.
With the rights to his creation in hand, May’s financial security was assured. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was printed commercially in 1947. A small children’s book publisher brought out an edition that sold 100,000 copies in two years. In 1948 Rudolph was shown in theatres as a nine-minute cartoon.
The Song
May persuaded his brother-in-law, songwriter Johnny Marks, to develop lyrics and a melody for a Rudolph song that the phenomenon really took off. In 1949, cowboy singing sensation Gene Autry’s recording of the song sold two million copies and went on to become one of the best-selling songs of all time. There was no end to Rudolph’s leaps. A company was formed to market and merchandise the Rudolph name. The Rudolph phenomenon really took off and eventually made May a very rich man. A TV special about Rudolph narrated by Burl Ives was produced in 1964 and remains a perennially popular Christmas favourite in the USA. The story and song have now been translated into more than 25 different languages. May quit his copywriting job in 1951 and spent seven years managing the Rudolph enterprise before returning to Montgomery Ward, where he worked until his retirement in 1971.
In 1958 May presented the original manuscript of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to Dartmouth College, together with several copies of the published version and Rudolph memorabilia. Since then other editions of the Christmas tale have been acquired and additional memorabilia donated by the children of Robert May. Today one can see in Special Collections twenty-six various editions including foreign-language ones, miniatures and pop-ups, and sheet music with the tune by Johnny Marks. The memorabilia include lamps, crockery, glassware, tinware, jewelry, neckties, kerchiefs, plush toys, music boxes, and original artwork. Not a part of the Library’s collection, but owned by the College, is a life-size papier-mâché Rudolph which was displayed on the front lawn of the May home in Evanston, Illinois, for more than twenty-five years. This Rudolph has been displayed in the rotunda of Hopkins Center on at least two Christmases.
The fame
So popular has Rudolph become that a two-column article in the 22 December 1985 issue of the New York Times appeared with the headline “Rudolph” Gets Refurbished,’ referring to restoration work being done on the forty-six-year-old manuscript by the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Massachusetts. Around Christmas time ever year each of the Ward’s stores display an extraordinarily large amount of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer memorabilia: stuffed toys, storybooks, Christmas wrap, shopping bags, gift boxes, lapel pins and posters all crowding the store’s shelves, walls and counters.
Robert May died in August 1976, just two months after attending his fiftieth reunion at Dartmouth. That little reindeer with the shiny red nose had made him a very wealthy man.
Fr Hedwig Lewis SJ is the author of “Christmas by Candlelight”. Published by <[email protected]>