Much More Than a Red Honker

Looking for some positive news this morning I came upon two articles having to do with my favorite Christmas character, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Gene Autry was one of the cowboy heroes of my childhood and I remember listening to his rendition of Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer until I wore out the recording playing it on my brother’s tiny record player. I never knew until now how or why the song came into being.

The Rudolph story brought tears to my eyes as I read it.

You see, each year about this time I seem to require a major booster injection of faith and hope. This story did the trick and helped me once again see the good part of people out there in the vast desensitized cultural wasteland of America.

So here’s the story. In 1938 Bob May’s wife was dying of cancer. He wanted his daughter to know that he loved her, so each night to help her drift off to sleep he told her stories about a special reindeer that helped Santa. He was broke, couldn’t afford to buy her Christmas presents, so he made her a picture book.

Bob’s wife died before Christmas. Still, he reluctantly decided to attend his company Christmas party where his colleagues encouraged him to read aloud his reindeer story, to everyone’s delight. Montgomery Ward, his company, ended up buying the rights to his story, eventually giving away 6 million copies to shoppers. Later the president of Montgomery Ward gave the rights back to May and Bob’s Rudolph story made millions of dollars for him. Bob’s brother-in-law helped him line up a famous singing cowboy named Gene Autry to make Bob’s Rudolph story into the musical legend we all know and love today. (Go here to checkout more of the story.)

And the other story?

Well, it seems that there is more to reindeer than red honkers.
It’s all about Rudolph’s antlers

“Through advanced computer modeling and x-ray techniques”, scientists at Queen Mary University of London, “observed the antler structure on a nanoscale level. They say this revealed the mechanisms responsible for their durability, an intermittently arranged set of fibers that seem to have evolved to take a hit, partnered with a breakable, shock-absorbing substance made up of non-collagenous proteins and minerals in between.” (Please see sources below.)

Translation:
Deer antlers are unusually tough and stiff. This new understanding of them, “could also shed new light on the structural modeling of bone” and further, 3D printing may be “used to create damage-resistant composite materials.”

Gene Autry, Rudolph The Red-Nose Reindeer, 1949

Sources
Researchers rack up "tough" secrets from deer antlers, Nick Lavars, New Atlas, 21 Dec 2016.
The research was published in the journal ACS Biomaterials.
Queen Mary University of London