For Episode 5 of irRegular People, I want to take a break from the heavy material of 2020. It’s been a hard year for most of us, in one way or another, and I thought perhaps a little Christmas special might be nice.
So, today I’m joined by two younger siblings of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Martha May and Chris May are both the children of Robert L May, the man who wrote the original story of Rudolph. Martha is my step-mother.
I figured I was going to tell you the origin story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, with Martha and Chris filling in the gaps with personal memories and thoughts. But, fortunately, Chris took the time to prepare something, and read it to me over the phone. It’s beautifully written, concise, and complete, and much better than anything I might have put together. So I’m going to let Chris tell you about Robert L May and the creation of Rudolph.
Most of us grow up accepting Rudolph as a part of some ancient Christmas folklore, perhaps passed down for hundreds of years. But, that’s just simply not the case.
So, here’s a short little trip into the life and mind of Robert L May, the man who created Rudolph, and some gifts from the hearts and memories of two of his children, Martha and Chris.
Below you can find the full text of the story that Chris tells in the beginning of the episode.
Martha May is one of the daughters of Robert L May, author of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
She is an award-winning realtor in the north shore area of Chicagoland. Martha lives with her husband Bill – and many Rudolph collectibles, photographs, and articles – in Lake Forest, IL.
Below is the written story that Chris tells us the episode:
I grew up as the younger brother of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, a character that my father, Robert L. May, created in 1939 in his children’s book by that title. When I popped into the world in 1943, Rudolph was already 4 years old.
As a kid, one of my fondest memories of Rudolph – and of my Dad – was our putting up a 6-foot-tall plaster statue of Rudolph in the front yard of our house in Evanston every Christmas. And Dad, quite rightly, often referred the to place as “The house that Rudolph built.”
As you know, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is the story of a fellow who was rejected by his peers because he looked different from them and didn’t quite fit in. One day he is blessed when Santa Claus realizes that Rudolph’s apparent infirmity would be invaluable in helping to guide his sleigh on even the foggiest of nights. The odd little guy whose difference made him an outcast suddenly became a hero!
The Rudolph character was in some ways modelled on Dad’s his own life. He grew up in New York as a smart little ethnic Jew who didn’t quite fit in. Part of the problem was that he was, at least early on, quite small. Dad regularly entered his weight in a journal that he kept, for this was evidently quite important to him at the time. February 8, 1922 was a big day in his life, for on that date, this 16-year-old high school senior finally weighed in at 100 pounds!
After graduating from Dartmouth College, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1926, Dad went out into the real world where he worked as a copy writer and copy editor of advertising for catalog and department stores. His first job was with Macy’s in New York City, but with the Great Crash in 1929, he had to move around the country quite a bit. In 1936, he and his wife, Evelyn (whom he married in 1928), and their 2-year-old daughter, Barbara, moved to Chicago where Dad took on an advertising job at Montgomery Ward, a rival of Sears, as one of the nation’s largest catalog stores. He would work at Ward’s for the next 24 years – finally retiring in 1970, six years before he died.
If Dad’s life in some ways resembled Rudolph’s in terms of his growing up as a sort of underdog, when and how did he finally get “discovered” by Santa and suddenly become a much more accepted hero?
One answer might be Christmas of 1939. Until then, Montgomery Ward had been giving away children’s coloring books at its catalog stores every holiday season. But that cost money. So in early 1939, Wards asked Dad – who was known to be a creative wordsmith –if he might come up with a children’s book they could give away instead, so that Wards wouldn’t have to buy someone else’s books.
Dad took to the idea and finished writing the Rudolph story by the end August. He got some key help from his daughter Barbara, who was now age 4! Dad would read her passages and then gauge her reaction to different word selections. It was a hard time for both of them, as Evelyn who had been suffering from cancer for several years died in late July 1939, shortly before Dad and Barbara had completed the Rudolph story.
Montgomery Ward published Rudolph as a soft-cover booklet that Christmas. The title page (not the cover) read: “Written for Montgomery Ward by Robert L. May.” Wards gave away 2.4 million copies of the book that year. But with the outbreak of World War II and the shortage of paper, Wards didn’t again give away the Rudolph book until Christmas 1946, when another 3.6 million copies were distributed.
Montgomery Ward – rather than my Dad — owned the copyright to the 1939 and the 1946 editions, since it was a work made for hire. As a result, Dad didn’t make any money from Rudolph during these years. But that didn’t really matter to him. And this gets to the heart of what I want to say about my Dad, something that I deeply admire him for.
His own childhood experiences, coupled with the then state of his life, made it easy for him to identify with the character he was bringing into the world. Many years later, he said that through Rudolph, he hoped to convey a “message of hope,” to tell the story of “an underdog” who was “yet triumphant in the end.” He hoped that children who heard or read the story of Rudolph would, in his words, be inspired by “the little deer who started out life as a loser, just as I did.” If there is a message in Rudolph, he said, it is that “tolerance and perseverance can overcome adversity. It is a story of acceptance.”
Rudolph’s sudden fame became the story of my Dad’s own final acceptance. Whatever doubts he may have had about himself were finally erased. In this way, what he got out of Rudolph was far more valuable than money, something that money could never buy.
Yet money did now flow onto the scene – lots of it! In 1947, Montgomery Ward, in an incredible act of generosity, gave the Rudolph copyright to my Dad, the company having decided that its two huge distributions were enough. That let Dad to find a commercial publisher for the Rudolph story, which now came out as a hardcover book that sold for all of 50 cents! When Dad’s brother-in-law then put the story to music in 1949 with the Rudolph song, things took suddenly took off.
In the years since Rudolph had made his first appearance in 1939, Dad had remarried; he and Virginia had three more kids, one of whom was me! Because of the new influx of money, we were finally able to move from our crowded Evanston apartment to a new house – the one with a big Rudolph that got erected on the front lawn every Christmas!
For a few years, Dad earned a great deal from Rudolph. But Uncle Sam took nearly all of it, for in those days, the top federal income tax rate for individuals was 92%! I kid you not! (The top rate today is 37%.) So Dad wasn’t able to save very much of the money that came in during those early years. However, he did take my Mom on a trip to Europe; before that, she’d never been outside the Midwest. He also purchased U.S. Savings Bonds to help with the kids’ educations, and also bought himself a pink and black 1956 Lincoln Continental. And, most importantly, in 1951 he was able to quit his job with Montgomery Ward.
However, in 1958, less than 7 years after he’d quit, Dad was back at Wards where he worked for another 12 years. When he finally retired in 1970, he was earning less than the $13,000/year I was making as a fresh-out-of-law school poverty lawyer in San Francisco’s Mission District.
But for Dad, it was never about the money. What mattered was that every December, he could literally dress up and step out into the world again as the proud father of Rudolph. Rudolph’s success never turned his head. He was and remained a humble man to the very end. I think he saw Rudolph as a blessing, rather than as something he could take full credit for. Yes, it was he who put the pen to paper and wrote the story. But he had no control over the almost magical way in which the world would embrace that creation.
That was probably one reason Dad was never very keen about enforcing the Rudolph copyright and trademark against every possible infringement. By the time he’d reached the end of his life, Rudolph had already become so much a part of the American culture that I’m not sure Dad really felt that he should continue to claim ownership of the character.
If he’d had his druthers, he might one day have decided Rudolph should become part of the so-called public domain – a step he never took. Instead, for better or for worse, the Rudolph character is still fully protected by copyright and trademark law, something for which all six of his children remain grateful to this day!
EPISODE CREDITS:
Produced, engineered, edited, and hosted by Calvin Marty.
Music written and performed by Calvin Marty.