Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Santa Claus Association

Episode Date: December 25, 2019

If a con man manages to make needy Christmas wishes come true is he still a con man? (Also, Merry Christmas!) Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's Jerry over there. Let's get jolly because, buddy, it is Christmas day.

Wow. Isn't that amazing? It's amazing. It's not to us, but it is to us. Sure. You know? Think about it. Yeah.

Well, anyway, Merry Christmas, everybody. Yes, and Merry Christmas to you and Jerry, and thank you for the lump of coal. You're welcome. And Jerry, thank you for the red wagon. Yeah. Thank you for my Ferrari, Jerry. Wow.

I got it. The wrong red wagon. Yeah. Yeah. You got a Magnum PI, red Ferrari. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Amazing. Thanks again, Jerry.

Anyway, since it's Christmas, Chuck, we have a special Christmas themed short stuff. Indeed. And it's about something called the Santa Claus Association. And if you wanna ever learn more about the Santa Claus Association, make sure you put those words in quotes

in your search engine, because there's a lot of different Santa associations. This is a specific one that we're gonna talk about. Yeah, and also add New York to that search. Yes. Because that'll really narrow it down too. Really will. So the Santa Claus Association we're talking about

has its backstory about the turn of the century, the last century, okay? And in New York City, in the United States really, the U.S. Postal Service had a way, a technique of dealing with little children's letters to Santa. The furnace. They would destroy them.

That's right. They would send these letters to the dead letter office and they would eventually be destroyed, or in the worst case scenario, return to the little sender. Oh wow. Isn't that awful? And it was even stamped return to little sender. Yeah.

They had a special stamp. Right. It was tiny. Yeah, and it had like a reindeer on its back with X's for eyes. Right. The popular press, the media, as we call them today, and the public said, this is wrong.

There's gotta be a better way to do this. What if like charities could get their hands on these letters and then they can fulfill these wishes? Because Santa's busy. He doesn't really have time for the letters. Maybe some grownups could intervene. And... Grownups.

Yeah, right. And so they said that was great. And the Postmaster General at the time in 1907 said, that's fine. I'm commanding all post offices in the United States to just hand over letters to Santa to any charity that wants to fulfill them. I wonder if the Postmaster General's just like,

oh God, with these letters. Like, I'm trying to do a job here. Right, yes. That was the impression that I had. They did not want to be in the Santa mail business anymore. And this is a God's time for them. Okay, everything worked pretty well for 1907. And then in 1908, or during 1907,

the Charitable Organization Society of New York, the COS, actually took it upon themselves to start investigating the backgrounds of some of the letter writers to Santa. And they went to their houses unannounced. Can you, is there a little Timmy who lives here? Basically. And let's see the crutches that you mentioned

in your letter, Timmy. And they actually determined that some of these letter writers weren't quite as needy as they made themselves sound in their letters. They determined that one little girl already had a doll. Oh boy. Anyway, this is enough to get the Postmaster General to reverse his decision.

In 1908, he said, nope, we're sending him back to the dead letter office. That's right. That outburst or that outcry, the public outcry against that was even worse than it was before. So then finally, Chuck, we've reached the end of the backstory.

In 1911, the Postmaster General, the new one said from now on, from to infinity and beyond, the United States Postal Service will hand over letters to Santa to any charity that wants them, which is great. But in New York, no one stepped up for two years. And by the time 1913 rolled around,

it seemed that there wouldn't be a Santa again to fulfill these children's wishes in their letters to Santa. In New York City. Yes. That's right. And it was all over the papers, headlines like mailmen disowned Santa

and Santa Claus is tardy saint took over the streets. And on December 8th of, I guess, 1913, Edward Morgan, who was the New York City's Postmaster, who also had more important fish to fry. Right. He got a letter from a guy who was a customs broker named John Duvall Gluck Jr. And he said, let me run this thing,

hand it over to me and Morgan said, great. He did. Just get this off my plate. I'm really happy to not have to deal with this. Gluck had no kids. He was not married. And the story was that he was a kind hearted man who wanted to do something with his life.

Right. And he saw this as an entree into that world. He also had some pretty impressive credentials for somebody who steps up and says, I'll handle the Santa business for the post office from now on. He said that he was a special representative of newspapers, a famous tariff expert and investigator,

and a member of the Secret Service. None of those things were true. Yeah. I mean, the name of this article that you found was the con man who saved Christmas. Yeah, that was from History Extra. So that should tell you kind of where this was headed. Yeah.

This guy was lying to begin with, and the story just gets even more interesting. Should we take a break? We should. All right. Let's take a break and we'll tell you about Gluck right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine

Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

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So the thing about Gluck was this. He was a confidence man. He was a fraud. He made up all of his credentials and all that. But with the Santa Claus Association, he actually did do something genuinely good for once. Yeah, he did. He started this organization, and it was described as bottom

up, which is a good way to describe it, because the donors and the people who did this were New York City residents. They were the real people. He provided, he created the app, basically, that got people in touch with other people, got these letters in the hands of folks that had a little extra money.

In the case of H. Vanderbilt, he only chipped in $10, apparently. Which is still only a couple hundred bucks today. Look, it was like $2.75. It's a skin flint. I was thinking, hmm, we have a pretty good idea these days after looking at the inflation calculator for so many years, and that one definitely stuck.

So people were volunteering. A lot of people were from clubs and organizations, but many just regular average New Yorkers. They didn't have a lot of money themselves sometimes. Right, so imagine this. If you're a New Yorker and you feel like your city has literally turned its back, almost literally turned its back, on needy children by ignoring their letters to Santa,

even though anybody could take it and fulfill it. Having Gluck step up and say, we can do this and create the Santa Claus Association, it just filled the city with pride. And they started throwing money at the Santa Claus Association faster than it could use it. Yeah, they, I think that first year, they answered the request of 28,000 children. That's astounding.

That is super astounding. And they kept doing this for another like 15 years or so, and he kept asking for a little bit more money. Like, hey, at first it was, let me cover the stamps. Sure, just the stamps, man. Yeah, exactly, and then it was envelopes. Just a few envelopes. And then it was, how about some money for the gifts,

you know, and then he said, well, how about this? Right in the middle of Manhattan, let's build a Santa Claus building. Yeah, he said that the unusual nature of our work kind of demands that we have our own space to work in. Yeah, and I mean, was this just sort of being rubber stamped the whole time? Because it seems like he just kept getting more and more funds.

Yeah, the way that this History Extra article puts it is that the optimism, the post-World War I and Jazz Age optimism really kind of created this sense of like, we can do anything. Everybody's great. Of course, the guy who's running the Santa Claus Association is fine. Like, have you heard Jazz? Exactly.

Well, we can definitely pay for a Santa Claus building. Have you tried a Jazz cigarette, too? Ooh. Try one of those. Is that like what Brad Pitt smoked and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? Probably, what was that? Oh, no, no, no.

The acid-dipped cigarette? It was just a pot, a marijuana cigarette, I think is what they call it today. Gotcha. Yeah, and they're like, have you seen this new movie, For Madness? It's amazing. You're going to want to jump out a window.

You'll be so excited. So 11 years in is when the first Macy's Christmas Parade happens, which would eventually become the Thanksgiving Day Parade. And it was all just sort of coalescing with catalogs and things like that. And everyone's notion of Christmas was just getting more and more commercial and more

in the news, and it was just a big, big deal. Yeah, Christmas became huge. Like the Christmas that we understand it today. That's right. It happened during this time, and it happened during the time that Gluck Santa Claus Association was handling answering the needy children of New York's Christmas wishes.

That's right. But Inter, Bird, Collar, New York's Commissioner of Public Welfare. His motto was, hey, I'm not the bad guy here. Probably so. He was charged with going around to the unregulated charities of New York City and closing them down, asking to see their financial records.

Including what, Chuck? Well, including the Santa Claus Association. Yes, but in addition to the Santa Claus Association, he would investigate block parties that were raising money for the neighborhood because they hadn't registered as charitable organizations. He was that kind of guy. You've got to make sure the money's going in the right place.

Yeah, so he said, this Santa Claus Association smells a little fishy. I'm going after him. And Gluck said, gulp. Yeah, he did because he didn't keep great records, which turned out to kind of save him because he didn't have much documentation. He could not be convicted of a crime

when they found tens of thousands of dollars just unaccounted for, basically. Yeah, that's $1920, by the way. That's right. There's no $10 donation. I think a dead giveaway that this might have been a fishy operation was that the headquarters of the Santa Claus Association was in the back of a steakhouse in Manhattan.

I tried to find out what steakhouse could not find it. I did, too. The closest I could find was it was in the Woolworths building. That's all that do. But that's it. There's no name for it or anything like that. I wanted to know because knowing New York City, it's still there. It's not.

I didn't know if it was like a Keens or something. No, the Woolworths building is still there, but I'll bet it somebody's like a trillion dollar apartment right now. Right. And it's still stinks of dead beef. So, gross. Like we said, Gluck could not be convicted.

But they said, you are definitely not in charge of this Santa Claus Association anymore. They took away his letters, and he left for Miami, which is, I mean, talk about a surefire way to cement yourself as a con man. He's like, I'm off to Miami. But the good news is they didn't start sending letters back to the dead letter office.

Pretty soon, the US Postal Service would undertake Operation Santa Claus, which we've talked about in a previous Christmas edition, ironically, not based on necessarily. But I think Gluck's system was sort of an inspiration. Closely following it for sure. Yeah, they were like, OK, the guy went to Miami. We understand who he is now.

That's right. But it was a pretty good idea. So we're going to stick to it. And still to this day, rather than the Santa Claus Association handling things, it's a committee of postal employees that are now the app that connects children in need and the donors that want to help them out on Santa Claus's behalf.

It's wonderful. And yeah, hats off to Alex Palmer for that history extra article, who's among one of several. Well, Merry Christmas, everybody. That is it for this short stuff. Short stuff away with sleigh bells. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.

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