Scrapbook tells how Rudolph went down in history

AP News — Staff

A first edi­tion of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Rein­deer”, bot­tom, and an orig­i­nal lay­out, top, part of a spe­cial col­lec­tion at Dart­mouth Col­lege, are dis­played on Tues­day, Dec. 20, in Hanover, N.H. The book is from the estate of Robert May, a Dart­mouth grad­u­ate who wrote the famous story in 1939 as part of a Mont­gomery Ward mar­ket­ing cam­paign. (AP Photo/Toby Talbot)

By HOLLY RAMER

Asso­ci­ated Press writer

HANOVER, N.H. (AP)—You know Dasher and Dancer and the rest of the gang. But do you recall, the most “Per­fect Christ­mas Crowd-Bringer” of all?

That’s how exec­u­tives at Mont­gomery Ward orig­i­nally described Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rein­deer, who first appeared in a 1939 book writ­ten by one of the company’s adver­tis­ing copy­writ­ers and given free to chil­dren as a way to drive traf­fic to the stores.

Curi­ous to know more about how Rudolph really went down in his­tory? It’s all in the pages of a long-overlooked scrap­book com­piled by the story’s author, Robert L. May, and housed at his alma mater, Dart­mouth College.

AP News — Staff

Children’s notes in a scrap­book on “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Rein­deer,” are dis­played Tues­day, Dec. 20, in Hanover, N.H. (AP Photo/Toby Talbot)

May donated his hand­writ­ten first draft and illus­trated mock-up to Dart­mouth before his death at age 71 in 1976, and his fam­ily later added to what has become a large col­lec­tion of Rudolph-related doc­u­ments and mer­chan­dise, includ­ing a life-sized papier-mache rein­deer that now stands among the stacks at the Rauner Spe­cial Col­lec­tions Library. But May’s scrap­book about the book’s launch and suc­cess went unno­ticed until last year, when Dart­mouth archivist Peter Carini came across it while look­ing for some­thing else.

“No one on staff cur­rently knew we had it. I pulled it out and all the pieces started falling out. It was just a mess,” Carini said.

The scrap­book, which has since been restored and cat­a­logued, includes May’s list of pos­si­ble names for his story’s title character—from Rod­ney and Rollo to Regi­nald and Romeo. There’s a map show­ing how many books went to each state and let­ters of praise from adults and chil­dren alike.

The scrap­book also chron­i­cles the mas­sive mar­ket­ing cam­paign Mont­gomery Ward launched to drum up news­pa­per cov­er­age of the book give­away and its efforts to pro­mote it within the company.

Near the front of the scrap­book is a large col­ored poster instruct­ing Mont­gomery Ward stores about how to order and dis­trib­ute the book. An illus­tra­tion of Rudolph sweeps across the page, his name writ­ten in ornate script. There are excla­ma­tion points galore. “The rollinckingest, rip-roaringest, riot-provokingest, Christ­mas give-away your town has ever seen!” ”A laugh and a thrill for every boy and girl in your town (and for their par­ents, too!)”

Rudolph is described as “the per­fect Christ­mas crowd-bringer,” if stores fol­low a few rules, includ­ing giv­ing the book only to chil­dren accom­pa­nied by adults. “This will limit ‘street urchin’ traf­fic to a min­i­mum, and will bring in the PARENTS … the peo­ple you want to sell!”

The response was overwhelming—at a time when a print-run of 50,000 books was con­sid­ered a best-seller, the com­pany gave away more than 2 mil­lion copies that first year and by the fol­low­ing year was sell­ing an assort­ment of Rudolph-themed toys and other items.

But lest this become a story about cor­po­rate greed, it should be noted that in 1947, Mont­gomery Ward took the unusual step of turn­ing over the copy­right to the book to May, who was strug­gling finan­cially after the death of his first wife.

“He then made sev­eral mil­lion dol­lars using that in var­i­ous ways, through the movie, the song, mer­chan­dis­ing and things like that,” Carini said. “I think it’s a great story because it shows how cor­po­ra­tions used to think of them­selves as part of civil soci­ety and how much that has changed.”

May even­tu­ally left Mont­gomery Ward to essen­tially man­age Rudolph’s career, which really took off after May’s brother-in-law Johnny Marks wrote the song (made famous by Gene Autry in 1949), and the release of a stop-motion ani­mated tele­vi­sion spe­cial in 1964.

Both the song and movie depart sig­nif­i­cantly from May’s orig­i­nal plot, how­ever. In May’s story, Rudolph doesn’t live at the North Pole or grow up aspir­ing to pull Santa’s sleigh—he lives in a rein­deer vil­lage and Santa dis­cov­ers him while fill­ing Rudolph’s stock­ing on a foggy Christ­mas Eve.

“And you,” Santa tells Rudolph, “May yet save the day! Your won­der­ful fore­head may yet pave the way!’”

May’s story is writ­ten in verse, sim­i­lar to “The Night Before Christ­mas” by Clement Clarke Moore, and opens, “‘Twas the day before Christ­mas and all through the hills/ The rein­deer were play­ing … enjoy­ing the spills.”

“It’s lovely to hear it read out loud, it really comes alive,” Vir­ginia Herz, one of May’s daugh­ters, said in a phone inter­view this week.

As a small child, Herz, who declined to reveal her age, didn’t think there was any­thing unusual about grow­ing up in a house sur­rounded by Rudolph mer­chan­dise. It wasn’t until she was older that she real­ized her father’s job of “tak­ing care of Rudolph” was a bit dif­fer­ent. She tells her grand­chil­dren that their great-grandpa wrote a story about Rudolph, not that he cre­ated the character.

“As I child, that’s how I felt. I knew my dad had writ­ten a won­der­ful book about Rudolph and now there were Rudolph toys and other things all around us,” she said. “But it was no dif­fer­ent than the guy next door who sold cars, or the guy down the street who was a paint­ing contractor.”

She acknowl­edges the myths that have become entwined in Rudolph’s his­tory —includ­ing the notion that May wrote the story as a Christ­mas gift for his older daugh­ter, Bar­bara, when his wife was dying of can­cer and that a Mont­gomery Ward man­ager “caught wind of the lit­tle sto­ry­book.” In real­ity, Mont­gomery Ward assigned May to write a Christ­mas book around the same time his wife was ill, Herz said.

”What’s out there on the Inter­net is a softer telling,” she said. “My dad was aware of it and con­sid­ered it appro­pri­ate. There’s the softer, roman­tic ver­sion and the more fact-based version.”

Herz said her father would be thrilled to see how his cre­ation and its many incar­na­tions have become part of Amer­i­can culture.

“I think he would be star­tlingly amazed,” she said. “It really is an eter­nal part of Christ­mas. He would have been amazed.”

Posted by AP News on Dec 23 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.