The Most Interesting Man in the World is a fantasy: A marketing firm-made character who symbolizes all the impossible and absurd desires of the American man.
There’s no real most interesting man in the world — except, according to reddit users, a man named Thomas J. Abercrombie.
“My grandfather worked for National Geographic for almost 40 years. Here’s some of the interesting situations he got himself into.”
That’s the title of a post last week by Maine resident Isaac Fer. Abercombie, a staff writer and photographer for National Geographic, was his grandfather.
The hirsute Abercombie, who, in his later years, resembled a (sober) Ernest Hemingway, was a globe-trotting adventurer — the first civilian correspondent to visit the South Pole, and, in 1966, the first Western journalist to cover the pilgrimage to Mecca.
It’s the stuff of movies, or at the very least, the daydreams of adventurous children. But it’s also the kind of extraordinary career that passes off-the-radar for most.
When Abercrombie passed away in 2006, only his family and his colleagues were left to remember him.
That is until Reddit came in to the picture.
Fer’s post — a collage of pictures of his grandfather — marched straight to the site’s front page, collecting thousands of upvotes.
Redditors commented on the photographs nearly 700 times, almost all positively.
“Does anyone else see the resemblance to ‘the most interesting man in the world’?” wrote one redditor..
Wrote another: “I don’t always find men who are more interesting than the most interesting guy in the world. But when I do, it’s this guy.”
Fer was thrilled at those comparisons and by the reaction in general. “My mother and I were amazed,” wrote Fer in an email to the Daily Dot, adding that the collage was viewed over 600,000 times. “We live in Maine; that’s more than half the entire state’s population.”
Fer and his mother had been working together on a book about Abercombie and his wife, Lynn, for five years. The work was recently published through a small Maine publishing house. They set up a Facebook fan page for the book, but that had only gathered about 400 fans, mostly his grandfather’s old friends and colleagues, Fer noted.
So after seeing all the attention from Reddit, whose users are predominately young men, Fer said his mother “was overjoyed to see so many new people learn about her father … she sees this as having reached a whole new generation.”
But what would his grandfather thought of the attention?
“Tom was an immensely modest man,” Fer wrote. “I’m not sure he would have liked, or rather understood, his popularity on Reddit.”
That doesn’t mean that Abercrombie wouldn’t have appreciated the social news site.
“He loved to share,” Fer added. “And I think that aspect of Reddit would have really appealed to him; the fact that anyone with something to share can bring it to the crowd’s attention, and that the users of the site, and not some editor or boardroom executive decides what the front page looks like each day.”
For a day last week, those hundreds of thousands of users decided the front page should look a whole lot like Thomas J. Abercrombie.