(WBBM NEWSRADIO) – Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a perennial Christmas favorite, thanks to the catchy tune recorded by Gene Autry in 1949 and the legendary 1964 TV special that still airs every year.
Actually, the iconic underdog character who ends up using his scorned ability to save Christmas was spawned in Chicago years before, during the city’s famous era of downtown department stores.
In the late 1930s, Montgomery Ward was looking for an in-house Christmas story it could print up and hand out to shoppers during the holidays. The store commissioned copy writer Robert L. May to create the tale. He came up with the now-familiar story of the outcast Rudolph and his glowing schnozz.
“It's such a wonderful story, and there's so many different angles to it that children of all ages can relate to, about the bullying that still goes on today,” Martha May, one of May’s daughters, says on the latest podcast episode of Looped In: Chicago.
Surviving family members talk about the staying power of Rudolph and his underlying message.
“I believed in Rudolph for a really long time. I thought he was real,” says Martha’s younger sister, Betsy. “And I’d stand by my window as a little kid and my siblings would indulge me, and I'm sure I was either hallucinating or I saw an airplane with a red blinking light. And I was like, ‘There he is. There's the sleigh, there's Rudolph.’"
She said she ultimately realized Rudolph was just a character in a story – but a really important one.
“He was different, and he found a way to take what made him different and do really good things with it, instead of feeling bad about himself.”