Short Stuff: The Santa Claus Association

If a con man manages to make needy Christmas wishes come true is he still a con man? (Also, Merry Christmas!)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, I'm 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. Is that amazing? It's amazing. It's
not to us, but it is to us. Think about it. Yeah. Well, anyway,
Merry Christmas everybody. Yes, and Merry Christmas to you and Jerry.

(00:24):
And thank you for the lump of goal. You're welcome.
Uh and uh Jerry, thank you for the red wagon. Yeah,
thank you for my ferrari. Jerry, Wow, I got it
the wrong red wagon. You got a magnet p I
red Ferrari. Yeah, it's pretty awesome, amazing, Thanks again, Jerry. Anyway,

(00:44):
since it's Christmas, Chuck, we have a special Christmas them
short Stuff, and it's about something called the Santa Claus Association.
And if you want to 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

(01:05):
going to talk about. And also add uh New York
to that search, yes, because that'll really narrow it down
to really well. So the Santa Claus association we're talking
about has its backstory in the about the turn of
the century, um the last century, okay, and in New
York City in the United States, really, the US Postal

(01:25):
Service had away a technique of dealing with little children's
letters to Santa the Furnace. They would 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, returned to the little sender. That awful,
and it was even stamped return to little Cinder. Yeah,

(01:46):
they had a special standard, right and it had uh yeah,
had like a reindeer on its back with excess for eyes.
So the popular press, the media as we call them
today and the public said, this is wrong. There's got
to be a better way to do this. What if
like charities could get their hands on these letters and
then they can fulfill these these wishes because Santa is busy,

(02:08):
he doesn't really have time field letters. Maybe some grown
ups could intervene and uh, all right, And so they
said that was great, And the Postmaster General at the
time in nineteen o seven 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

(02:28):
fulfill them. I wonder if the Postmaster General is just like,
oh God with these letters, like trying to do a
job right. Yes, that was the impression that I had,
is they did not want to be in the Santa
Male business anymore, and this is a God send for them. Okay.
Everything worked pretty well for nineteen o seven, and then
in nineteen o eight or during the nineteen o seven um,

(02:48):
the Charitable Organization Society of New York, the COS, actually
took it upon themselves to start investigating the backgrounds of
some of the le to 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, let's

(03:09):
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 anyway, this is enough to to get the
Postmaster General to reverse his decision in nineteen o eight.
He said, Nope, We're sending them back to the dead
Letter office. That outburst or that outcry, the public outcry

(03:33):
against that was even worse than it was before. So then, finally, Chuck,
we've reached the end of the back story. In nineteen eleven,
the Postmaster General, the new one said from now on,
for 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

(03:54):
no one stepped up for two years, and by the
time roll around, it's 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. Uh.

(04:18):
And on December eight of I guess Edward Morgan, who
was the New York City's postmaster who also had more
important fish to fry. Uh. He got a letter from
a guy who was a customs broker named John Duval
Gluck Jr. And he said, let me run this thing
handed over to me, and Morgan said great. He did

(04:41):
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. Uh. And the story was was
that he was a kind hearted man who wanted to
do something with his life, and this he saw this
as an entree into that world. He also had some
some pretty impres us of credentials for somebody who steps

(05:01):
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

(05:23):
kind of where this was headed. 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. So the thing about Gluck was this, he

(06:06):
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 um. He started this organization
and it was described as a bottom up um, which
is a good way to describe it, because the donors

(06:28):
and the people who did this were New York City residents.
They were the real people. He provided. He created the
app basically exactly that got people in touch with other people,
got these letters in the hands of folks that had
a little extra money. Uh. In the case of h. Vanderbilt,
he only chipped in ten dollars apparently, which is still

(06:48):
only like a couple hundred bucks. I looked it was
like to seventy. I was thinking, we have a pretty
good idea these days after looking at the inflation calculator
for so many years, and that one definitely stunk. Uh.
So people were volunteering. A lot of people were um
from clubs and organizations, but many just regular average New

(07:10):
Yorkers who 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

(07:30):
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 twenty eight thousand children. That's astounding, that is super astounding.
And they kept doing this for another like fifteen years
or so, and he kept asking for a little bit

(07:52):
more money, um like, Hey, at first it was let
me cover the stamps, just the stamps, man, Yeah, exactly.
And then then it was envelopes, just just a few envelopes,
and then it was how about some money for the gifts,
you know, And then she said, how about this right
in the middle Manhattan, let's build a Santa Claus building. Yeah.
He said that the um, like, the the unusual nature

(08:13):
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
One and jazz age optimism really kind of created this
sense of like we can do anything. Everybody's great. Of

(08:37):
course the guy who was running a Santa Claus association
is fine, Like, have you heard jazz exactly what? We
can definitely pay for a Santa Claus building. Have you
tried a jazz cigarette? To try one of those? Is
that like what Brad Pitt smoked? And uh, once upon
a time in Hollywood probably what was that? Oh no,
no, no no acid cigarette. It was just pot marijuana cigarett,

(09:00):
I think is why they call it today, gotcha. Yeah,
and they're like, have you seen this new movie Reefer Madness.
It's amazing. You're gonna want to jump out a window.
You'll be so excited. So eleven 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, uh,

(09:25):
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. It happened during this
time and it happened during the time that Gluck Santa
Claus Association was handling um answering the needy children of
New York's Christmas wishes. That's right. But enter Bird Collar,

(09:50):
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 uh closing them down, asking to see
their financial records, including what Chuck while including the Santa

(10:10):
Claus Association. Yes, but in addition to Santa Claus Association,
he would investigate block parties that were raising money for
the neighborhood because they hadn't registered his charitable organizations. He
was that kind of guy. You got to make sure
that the money's going in the right place. Yeah. So
he said this Santa Claus Association, little fishy, Yeah, I'm
going after him, and Gluck said, yeah he did because

(10:34):
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 by the way, that's right, that's no ten dollar donation.
I think a dead giveaway that there this might have
been a fishy operation was that the headquarters of the

(10:56):
Santa Claus Association was in the back of a steakhouse
in Manhattan. I tried to find out what steakhouse and
could not find it. I did to the closest I
could find was it was in the wool or wool Worth.
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 Keynes or something. No, there's a The

(11:17):
wold Worth building is stiller, but I'll bet it's somebody's
like trillion dollar apartment right now, right and still thinks
of dead beef. So gross. Like we said, Gluck could
not be convicted. Um, but they said you are definitely
not in charge of this Santa Claus Association anymore. Um.
They took away his letters and uh, he left for Miami,

(11:42):
which is I mean, talk about a sure fire away
to cement yourself as a con man. It's like, I'm
off to Miami. But the good news is they didn't
start sending letters back to the dead letter office. Um.
Pretty soon the US Postal Service would undertake Operation Santa Claus,
which we talked abou out in a previous Christmas edition. Ironically, UM,

(12:04):
not based on necessarily, but I think Gluck System was
sort of an inspiration closely following it for sure. Yeah,
they were like, Okay, the guy went to Miami. We
understand who he is now, but it was a pretty
good idea, so we're gonna stick to it and still
to this day, rather than UM, the Santa Claus Association
handling things, it's a committee of Postal employees that are

(12:27):
now the 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 uh yeah, hats off to
Alex Palmer for that history extra um article. Who's among
one of several Well, Merry Christmas, everybody that is it
for the short Stuff Short Stuff Away with Sleigh Bells.

(12:54):
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