An Interview with the Grinch's Brother, Martin Grinch
An ACBN holiday exclusive
The Grinch is one of the most popular characters in the modern Christmas canon.
First introduced to mass audiences in the 1957 children’s book How The Grinch Stole Christmas, the ghoulishly-grinning green gremlin has become as much a part of the holiday’s popular lore as Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer. To many people, it’s simply not Christmas without the Grinch.
Of course, few people know the backstory behind the character—the real person that inspired it, and the problems his anti-Christmas antics caused for his family.
Most of the Grinch’s family has long since passed away, but I was able to track down a surviving relative—his youngest brother, Martin Grinch. After decades spent hiding from the unwanted attention his relation to his brother might bring, he agreed to sit down for an interview for the first time ever.
We met during the sparsely-populated off-peak hours at a chain restaurant in the Midwestern suburb where he has lived for many years. He’s nearing eighty, but spry, fit and handsome, with a full head of white hair, a quick smile and a firm handshake. Before we began our formal interview, he explained that he felt it was finally time for another side of his family’s story to be told.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Thank you again for meeting with me today.
Of course.
To start things off, I have to be perfectly frank with you—I did not know that the Grinch had a family. To the extent that a backstory has ever been established in media depictions of the character, he was supposedly an orphan.
Famous figures don’t always put their upbringings front-and-center.
I suppose that’s true. Osama Bin Laden styled himself as a rugged mujahideen, and not the as the wealthy scion of a construction-company dynasty.
Precisely.
Similarly, Kid Rock once rapped that he wasn’t “straight outta Compton” but rather “straight out the trailer”, when in fact his father owned multiple car dealerships.
I don’t know who that person is, but yes—often, the family backgrounds of famous or notorious figures fade from their story. The truth of the matter, though, is that “The Grinch”, as you and most people know him, was not an orphan.
He was my older brother, Harold Humphrey Grinch, Jr.
Tell us about your upbringing.
It was a modest one, but a happy one. We weren’t a wealthy family by any stretch, but we didn’t want for many things. My father, Harold Grinch Sr., ran a successful boiler-repair business—Grinch & Sons Heating. That name, I should note, was aspirational—he started the company when Harry was only four years old, He’d always believed that his sons would follow in his footsteps.
By the time I came around, Harry was already helping Dad out at work. He was eleven years older than me, and though we’d both often tag along on jobs, I wasn’t good for much other than fetching a wrench from the toolbox. Harry was a teenager, and he’d do the actual work with Dad. He was a smart kid—strong, determined, principled. He often saw the world in very black-and-white terms, but he held himself to a high standard, and people respected him.
Now, there is no way to say this without being rude, but I have to note—you don’t look much like I expected.
Well, I can’t blame you for that. The popular depictions of my brother have not done him or I any favors. To be frank—he wasn’t a handsome man, at least not by today’s standards, but he didn’t look much like the fellow in the cartoon.
… was he green?
Only as much as anyone was in those days. Our drinking water wasn’t great.
Was there a specific moment when things changed, when your brother started down the path to infamy?
There was. It was Thanksgiving night, 1953. My father loved Thanksgiving—my mother was an excellent cook, and she’d always cook up a big goose. Dad would call it “roast beast”—on account of his personal distaste for living geese—and it was one of his favorite things to eat.
We were just sitting down to dinner, and the phone rings. It’s an emergency service call from H.M. Crittenden’s, one of the big department stores downtown—Dad did minor service calls for them often. Their boiler had gone out completely that afternoon. The day after Thanksgiving was expected to be their biggest sales day of the year, but it was also extremely cold. They needed a repair, and they needed it right away.
My mother begged him to stay, but there was no convincing Dad. He knew it was a big job, one that would go a long way toward Christmas presents for my sister Elise and I. He also felt a strong sense of duty toward his clients. He got up from the dinner table and headed right for his truck, and Harry went along with him. The two of them worked all night in the freezing cold, but they got the boiler up and running again, and by the time the first shoppers showed up at Crittenden’s doors the next morning, the store was as warm as ever.
It might sound silly to say this about a boiler repair, but it felt like what Dad and Harry had done was heroic. They’d saved Christmas, at least for one store.
I get the sense that something bad is about to happen in this story.
Yes. Dad and Harry got home around 4am, and grabbed a few hours sleep. They had to go back into the store after it had opened to collect their pay for the work. When they did, though, Crandall T. Crittenden III—the store’s president—refused to pay. He made some specious claim that it was faults in my father’s prior work for him that had caused the boiler to go out in the first place, and so he didn’t owe Dad a thing.
Of course, this was hogwash—Crittenden’s boiler was fifteen years past its reasonable lifespan, and Dad had been advising for replacement for at least half that time.
Harry was livid. He was ready to fist-fight Crittenden on the spot, but my father talked him down. It wasn’t worth arguing, Dad said—picking a fight with Crittenden would only make them look bad, even if they were in the right. “Never wrestle with pigs,” Dad would always say. “You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”
Well, Harry didn’t see things that way. He saw the situation for what it really was—an unprincipled rich man taking advantage of an honest working man.
And he decided to take matters into his own hands.
That’s right. He’d become well-acquainted with the layout of Crittenden’s store in their various service calls there, and he also knew which doors were easy to jimmy open. A few nights later, he snuck out in the middle of the night and went down there. He slipped into the store and stole all of their Christmas decorations. Didn’t leave a single ball, bulb or garland behind.
Now, this sounds like the character I know.
It was a real shock around town. People were scandalized. This was the 1950s, mind you—things like this didn’t happen every day. The next day, the front page of the evening paper read “WHO STOLE CHRISTMAS?” in big block letters.
So, the original Grinch robbery wasn’t a simple story of an evil creature attacking Christmas itself. It was revenge.
That’s right.
Did he get caught?
He didn’t. The thing about Harry was, he was smart—he knew how to cover his tracks. He didn’t leave any evidence, and the police had no suspects. Crittenden, for his sake, wasn’t smart enough to put two and two together.
My father knew it was Harry, though, and he was furious. He told him that he couldn’t be a part of the family business anymore, and they had a big blow-up argument. Harry said that he didn’t want to be a part of the family at all if Dad was just going to let people walk all over him, and he stormed out of the house.
You lost contact with him for several years after this, is that right?
Yes. He moved out, and we didn’t hear a word from him for several years.
A few years later, though, something dramatic happened.
[nodding] Whosburgh.
This, of course, is the real-life event later dramatized in the 1957 children’s book by Dr. Seuss—the wholesale looting of Whosburgh, Pennsylvania on Christmas Eve. This time it wasn’t a store being robbed of their Christmas cheer, but an entire small town.
It was a major scandal. Fifty houses burglarized in a single night, along with the department store, post office, grand hotel and every restaurant on Main Street. It was such a thorough and coordinated looting of the town that some speculated it was the beginning of a war with the Rooskies. Actual details were sparse, although one newspaper reported a man wearing a Santa Claus costume having been seen that night.
We knew right away that it was Harry.
What made you think that?
It was the principled cruelty of the attack. It wasn’t a get-rich-quick robbery—whoever had done it had taken everything regardless of value. You’re not going to make any money reselling used Christmas ornaments. This couldn’t have been a simple heist. No, it was something different.
It was an act of terrorism, one that could only have come from Harry.
What was your family’s reaction?
My father contacted the authorities, tried to tell them that we knew who had done it. They brushed us off, though—it was a high-profile crime, and they’d received thousands of tips both serious and from pranksters. There was no reason for them to believe him.
He tried, though—he hoped that we could save Harry, stop him before he did something even worse. We didn’t know what he was capable of, but we wanted to get him help before it was too late. Before someone got hurt.
Then came the manifesto.
That’s right. An open letter to the local paper claiming responsibility.
It was a rambling screed—fifteen thousand words decrying the commercialization of Christmas, the rampant consumerism and greed that he saw creeping in. It read like the work of a madman, and frankly, it might’ve allowed people to write it off in their minds as such.
But he signed it.
He did. “Harold H. Grinch, Jr.”
Why do you think he did this?
Well, first of all, I think he fully believed in his own ability to avoid capture.
He’d done lots of camping trips and cave-exploration as a young man—Boy Scouts, all that—and he likely figured that he could live off the land for a long time, find a cave to live in and hide out.
That’s not why he did it, though. He did it to hurt my father.
He’d been stung—first by Dad’s meek acquiescence in the face of greed, and then in Dad turning him out of the family business. It was clear that he wasn’t planning to forgive these things, and he wanted the Grinch name to be associated with this.
What impact did this have on your father?
It was devastating—to his business, first. People had written the Crittenden incident off as the work of teenaged vandals, but once the letter came out, the dots were connected. No business in town was going to trust a Grinch in their place. Twenty-year-long working relationships dried up overnight.
More than that, though, it was a personal injury to my father.
He withdrew after the the letter came out. He’d been a talkative, gregarious man, but after he was outed as the father of a terrorist, he closed up. Rarely went out in public, hardly ever said a word at home.
My sister and I often said in later years that his heart had shrank two sizes that day.
What impact did this have on you personally?
Things became very difficult for me at school. If not popular, I’d at least been well-liked; I’d gotten on well with my teachers and classmates alike. I became a pariah overnight, though—the kid whose brother stole Christmas. Kids would ask me if I hated Christmas, if I was going to break into their house and steal all their toys.
It was hurtful, but what could I say? I shared a name with the villain of the hour.
The incident might’ve faded out of the public consciousness, if not for Dr. Seuss’s 1957 book How The Grinch Stole Christmas. The book told a stylized version of the story—skirting any of the details laid out in the manifesto and instead painting “The Grinch” as a vindictive monster who simply hated Christmas cheer. The book became a bestseller, and spawned multiple adaptations—an animated television special in 1966, movies in 2000 and 2018, and numerous other incarnations of a character that would become known around the world.
The book was a double-edged sword, honestly.
It made our name even more broadly synonymous with anti-Christmas sentiment, but it also began divorcing the story from reality in the public consciousness.
That is to say—after a short while, I don’t think many people realized that “The Grinch” was a real character. The way he’s depicted as this cartoonish creature, it made him seem like an original creation of Dr. Seuss, not something that he’d read about in the newspapers.
Did you have any contact with Seuss—Theodor Geisel—yourselves?
My mother reached out a year or so after publication.
She made clear from the start that we weren’t seeking any of the money he made from the property—she just wanted to know if he’d heard anything from Harry.
Had he?
[chuckles] Oh, yes.
Soon after the book came out, Harry started sending him nasty letters, suspicious packages, all that. He was furious—both at his depiction and at the commercialization of his story. He didn’t want money from Geisel either, though; he was furious that money was being made off the work at all. Say what you will about Harry—he stuck to his principles. He hated that the story ended with The Grinch changing his ways—he thought it made him look like a “soft-willed buffoon with a noodle for a spine”.
Geisel didn’t feel threatened by Harry’s onslaught, but he was certainly annoyed his persistence. I’m fairly certain that’s why they added that song in the animated special.
You’re referring to “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch”?
That’s right. The book was harsh about Harry, but the song?
[imitating Thurl Ravenscroft’s voice] You’re a bad banana with a greasy black peel? Your brain is full of spiders, you’ve got garlic in your soul, I wouldn’t touch you with a thirty-nine-and-half-foot-pole?
That was Geisel’s response, a real “eff you” to Harry.
Did you ever think about changing your name?
I’m hesitant to admit it, but yes, I did consider it, especially after the special came out. I was in college by that time, and I got awfully tired of hearing my classmates sing that song when I walked by. Heck, I couldn't introduce myself to a young lady without her thinking I was shining her on with the name.
“Oh, like the Grinch?”, people would say.
I’d wince, because they didn’t even know the half of it. I resisted the temptation to shake it off, though. As much trouble as it caused for me, I was proud of the Grinch family name. It wasn’t just Harry’s name, it was my father’s name, my grandfather’s name. It was who we were, even if one of our own had strayed so far from the family values.
What became of Harry?
He went into hiding, just as we suspected that he would. He didn’t attempt any further robberies, at least as far as I know. Stores got smarter about security in the 1960s, anyway. He didn’t disppear entirely, though. He’d often write letters to newspapers’ editors ranting about Christmas being bastardized, all that—the same things he put in his manifesto.
The problem was, they all either discarded them as the work of a prankster, or published them as obvious satire—I mean, they were signed by “the Grinch”. Editors clearly thought they were meant as a joke.
Did he ever attempt to contact you?
We had no contact with him whatsoever; I had no way of knowing if he was alive or dead. He might’ve fled the country, or perhaps he got snagged for some other plot and was rotting away in prison. For the longest time, I wasn’t sure I cared, either.
I harbored a lot of anger toward Harry.
First of all, he was a criminal, and an unrepentant one. The Crittenden incident might’ve been a well-earned bit of comeuppance, but the Whosburgh thing—well, that was unforgivable. Thinking about all of those people—all of those kids—who woke up to find their Christmas morning stolen… it made my heart ache and my blood boil.
Beyond that, though, I couldn’t forgive what he did to my family.
My father became an object of public scorn, my mother the woman who’d raised a monster. They both died brokenhearted. My sister married out of the name and cut off contact with the rest of the family, and I couldn’t say that I blamed her for washing her hands of it all. For my own sake, it took me years to get over my anger at the situation. I was ashamed of my own flesh and blood, afraid to get to know anyone well enough to admit that my surname wasn’t just some unfortunate coincidence.
It sounds like you have gotten over it, though. What changed for you?
It was a simple realization for me. One day, I woke up and decided that my brother had no more right to define the Grinch name than I did. He might’ve gotten a healthy head start on it—and had a serious assist from Mr. Geisel—but my running from it would be conceding defeat without a fight.
I finished my studies, and went into teaching. I married, and we had four beautiful children—each of them Grinches, unapologetically. I taught at the local college for thirty-five years, and I was proud any time a student referred to me as “Mr. Grinch”.
Did you ever find out what happened to your brother?
Five years ago, a package arrived in the mail. The handwritten label identified it as coming from “H.H.G.”, at an address in a small town in rural Maine. I unwrapped it and found the box to be full of keepsakes—photos from my childhood that I’d never seen before.
There was also a key.
My eldest daughter and I traveled up to the address—it wasn’t easy to get to, and I’m not a young man anymore. It was miles up an unpaved mountain road from the nearest town, and we had to backtrack several times before we found a modest cabin. There was no sign of anyone there, but the key worked. It was clear that someone had lived there for a long time, and spent a lot of time alone. There were stacks and stacks of journals, but also freeze-dried foods, bottled water, batteries, all sorts of supplies. The place was entirely off the grid.
Behind the cabin, we found a shed with a workshop in it. There were all sorts of tools, wires, mechanical parts, timers. My heart sank when we saw it; I feared the worst, wondering what he’d been up to in there.
We spent a few hours in the cabin, trying to make sense of the mess and figure out how we might clean it all up. It was too much, though. We realized we were going to have to hire a crew to deal with it—to settle the estate, as it were. We trekked back down the mountain; we were tired, hungry, and out of sorts. The town was small, and there was only one place open, a little greasy-spoon diner. As we placed our order, my daughter—rather to my chagrin—asked the server if she’d known the old man who lived up the mountain.
To my surprise, her face brightened.
“Oh, Harry? Why sure, we all knew Harry. He’d come down the mountain once or twice a month, always had that sweet little dog of his riding with him. Quiet fellow, but very kind. He had this thing about Christmas.”
Obviously, I tensed up at that.
“Every Christmas Eve, he’d swing into town after all the kids had gone to bed. The whole bed of his truck would be full of handmade mechanical toys, really wonderful things. Must’ve taken him the whole year to make them. He’d spend the entire night going around town, leaving them on doorstops to be found the next morning. One year, I asked him what inspired him to do it.”
“He said to me— ‘it’s never too late to get in the Christmas spirit.’”
—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)
I was 10000% sure this headline was going to finish with "The Grink"
This is the kind of unhinged weirdness I require from my subscription.