When "the Singing Cowboy" became "the Singing Chipmunk"

            In 1949, when I was five years old, Gene Autry made the first recording of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”  Autry, a star of “B” movie westerns, was known as “the Singing Cowboy.”   In the post-World War II era, his fame and following rivaled that of Roy Rogers, who also was known to break into song – particularly duets with his wife, Dale Evans.

            Popular legend has it that Autry didn’t want anything to do with the song, but his wife talked him into recording it.  It sold two million copies in the first year and ultimately became the second biggest-selling Christmas record of all time, after Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.”  It also put Autry on the path to becoming one of the wealthiest men in Hollywood.

             One of those two million records that were sold in 1949 was purchased by my parents.  “Rudolph” was all the rage that Christmas season.   The song was being played incessantly on the radio and I, like all children my age, loved it.  We didn’t own a record player, but my cousin’s family, with whom we would be visiting on Christmas, did.   I insisted that my cousin must have a copy so we could listen to the song over and over.  My mother invested in a long-distance call to tell my aunt not to buy the record, because I wanted it to be my big surprise.

            As the present de jour, the record naturally was in short supply, especially in small towns like the one where we lived at the time, but my parents scoured the stores, and just before Christmas my father came home in triumph bearing a paper sleeve with a picture of Rudolph on the outside and the record nestled inside.

            On Christmas Eve I presented my cousin with our treasure within minutes of our arrival.  He ran to fetch his record player, which was a little portable model in a case with a metal latch.  We plugged it in and pulled the record out of the sleeve, but when we went to place it on the turntable we saw that the hole in the record was much too large for the spindle.  The prospect of not being able to listen to “Rudolph” for the ten-thousandth time almost brought me to tears, but my ever-resourceful father quickly came up with a solution.   He measured the hole in the record, cut a piece of corrugated cardboard from the box in which we had carried our gifts, and trimmed it into a disc that fit the hole perfectly.   He punched a small hole in the jury-rigged insert and placed the record on the turntable.  Excitedly, we switched on the record player and dropped the needle onto the record.

            When the music started, we heard “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” but not in Gene Autry’s mellow tenor voice.  Because we didn’t understand the difference between 78 and 45 rpm, that Christmas my family members were the first people everto hear a version of the song that others had to wait for until 1960, when the Chipmunks recorded “Rudolph” for the first time.