The Rudolph story begins with Robert Lewis May, the brother of Johnny Marks’ Jewish wife, Margaret May Marks. The Rudolph booklet published by the Montgomery Ward Company and distributed for free to their shoppers
Sometime in the 1930s, Robert May moved from New York to Chicago and took a fairly lowly and low-paid position as an “in-house” advertising copywriter for the Montgomery Ward Company, then only second to Sears as the country’s largest retailer.
His first wife, Evelyn, was Jewish, but I don’t know much more about her. Evelyn and Robert had a daughter, Barbara, who was born in 1934 or 1935. Evelyn contracted cancer in 1937 and Robert May’s life became something of a living hell as he spent his meager salary on cancer treatments as his wife was dying in their small Chicago apartment.
In early 1939, the Montgomery Ward advertising department asked May to write a “cheery Christmas story” that Ward could give away to shoppers for good will and to help spur Christmas sales.
From here, the story gets a little confused. The fairly important role of his daughter, Barbara, in the creation of the Rudolph poem, is found in articles from 1948 and 1949 about May. Barbara is also given a big role in a 1975 article about the writing of Rudolph. This last article was written by Robert May, himself.
However, Barbara is not mentioned or is given a bare mention in virtually every other newspaper piece about Rudolph’s creation between these dates, including one written by May, himself, in 1963.
The 1975 piece, “Rudolph Created in a Time of Sadness,” provides some details not in any other written account. First, May says that his Montgomery Ward boss suggested a Christmas tale about an animal. That suggestion, May said, got him thinking and he remembered his daughter Barbara loved the deer at the Chicago Lincoln Park Zoo. (I found this article in the Bedford, PA Gazette.)
In the 1949 piece, May mentioned that he ran names for the “star deer” of his story by Barbara and she picked Rudolph. In the 1975 piece, this fact is left out. In other accounts, May is reported to have “just considered” a number of names.
In his 1975 article, May writes that after he decided on a deer, and named him Rudolph, he asked an artist in the Montgomery Ward art department, Denver Gillen, to sketch a deer with a big red nose. Gillen, May writes, then accompanied him and Barbara to the zoo to check out actual deer. These became the models for his artwork…
https://www.interfaithfamily.com/arts_and_entertainment/popular_culture/Shining_a_Light_on_the_Largely_Untold_Story_of_the_Origins_of_Rudolph_the_Red-Nosed_Reindeer/
More laws, more fines, more intrusion- sanctioned highway robbery
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