You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen. And yes, you still recall the most famous reindeer of all.

But how did that red-nosed misfit become a key Christmas character? He wasn’t one of the original eight reindeer after all. Who gave him to us?

Robert L. May ("Bob" to his family and friends) grew up in a prosperous Jewish family in the early 20th century. Then the Great Depression hit, and the Mays were financially ruined.

Bob and his wife Evelyn moved to Chicago where he worked at Montgomery Ward as a copywriter for their famous catalogs. The hours were long and the pay was low, but in those days having a job, any job, was a blessing. Daughter Barbara soon arrived.

But the Mays' happiness didn’t last long.

Evelyn developed cancer. Bob spent his last dollar on the best medical treatment. But the odds of her recovering were long.

Bob’s boss gave him a special assignment in January 1939. Montgomery Ward gave customers a free holiday children's book every Christmas. Though it was popular, it was costly. They could save money by producing their own book for the next Christmas. Bob was told to write it.

Oh, and make it an animal story, the boss added. Bob wondered how an animal could relate to Christmas.

Bit by bit, the answer came to him.

He remembered how the now four-year old Barbara was crazy about deer at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo. Maybe that could be the animal. Santa's sleigh was pulled by reindeer, after all.

Bob spent hours talking with Evelyn each night. She told how she was painfully shy as a child, and how other kids cruelly made fun of her and excluded her from their games because of it.

Bob remembered later, “Suppose he (the story's hero) were an underdog, a loser, yet triumphant in the end. But what kind of loser? Certainly, a reindeer’s dream would be to pull Santa’s sleigh.”

Pondering that while staring out his office window, thick fog from Lake Michigan blocked the view. “Suddenly I had it! A nose! A bright red nose that would shine through fog like a spotlight.”

Bob toyed with different names. Reginald… Rollo … then Rudolph. That was it: he was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Bob excitedly took his story to his boss.

And the boss hated it. He said, “For gosh sakes, Bob, can’t you do better than that?”

But Bob refused to give up on Rudolph. He asked a friend in the company’s art department to draw a deer with a big red nose. The next Saturday Bob, little Barbara, and the artist visited the zoo’s deer pen. On Monday morning, the men took their design back to the boss. “Bob,” he said softly after seeing it, "forget what I said before and put that story into finished form.”

Bob began turning the story into a poem. But while he was writing it, Evelyn died.

He was devastated. His boss suggested time off work. Bob shook his head. “I needed Rudolph now more than ever. Gratefully, I buried myself in the work. Finally, in late August it was done.”

Bob read the finished poem to Barbara and Evelyn’s parents. “In their eyes I could see that the story accomplished what I had hoped,” he recalled.

When the book was given to Montgomery Ward customers that Christmas, it was a huge hit. The company gave away 2.5 million copies. By 1946 it had grown to 6 million.

That same year, a record company wanted to produce a spoken word version of the poem. But there was a problem: Montgomery Ward owned the rights to Rudolph’s story and image.

Someone took the matter directly to Ward’s big boss, the notoriously crusty, tough as nails Sewell Avery. Yet something touched Avery’s heart. To everyone’s astonishment, he handed over the rights to Rudolph.

A few years later, Bob’s brother-in-law Johnny Marks wrote the famous “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, and others passed on it. Cowboy singer Gene Autry finally put it on vinyl just to make his wife stop pestering him about it. Even then it was the “B Side” to another holiday song.

But Autry changed his tune when “Rudolph” became America’s number one hit song for Christmas week 1949. It sold 2.5 million copies that year alone, eventually becoming the second best-selling holiday record behind Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.”

Countless books, TV specials, and cartoons have told the story. The U.S. Postal Service honored Rudolph with his very own postage stamp in 2014.

Bob remarried and had five more children. Rudolph provided him a comfortable income, but didn’t make him rich. He passed away in 1976.

What was his payoff? As Bob May said, “My reward is knowing that every year, when Christmas rolls around, Rudolph still brings happiness to millions, both young and old.”

And just as the other reindeer promised, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer did indeed go down in history.

J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former broadcast journalist and government communicator. His weekly offbeat look at our forgotten past, "Holy Cow! History," can be read at jmarkpowell.com.

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