In the ‘80s passing notes in school was complicated. Now you can easily do it electronically with a quick text silently typed under your desk, but back in the day when paper and pencil was involved, it was serious business. There was always the risk your note could land in the wrong hands and you could die of embarrassment! You wanted to make sure the person you were sending the note was the only person who could read it so of course secret codes were involved. OK, I never witnessed anyone dying of embarrassment but there were several times I heard the tears of humiliation in the girls’ bathroom and that was enough to scare me into the code business.
Because none of us worked for the CIA and we didn’t have the Internet (www.wikihow.com/Pass-Notes-in-Class), the code most note passers used at the time was the alphabet code. A=1, B=2 and so on until you got to Z=26. We were positive that this was a sure fire way to ensure full privacy. Who could ever crack this?
Most notes took several minutes to decipher and didn’t hold super exciting information. They usually were about phone calls that would come later that night. 3,1,12,12-21-1,20-19,9,24 = Call u at 6.
They had all the climax of Ralphie’s “Drink More Ovaltine” from The Christmas Story, but it was fun to do and we were sure we were pulling one over on Mrs. Mianowski. She’d never crack this code after all she had only been a math teacher for the last 30 years! What would she know about the numbers code? Just in case, sometimes it would be numbers code in reverse…. how long would it take her to figure out A=26? That would really fool her!
I recently found a fun take on the alphabet code that I thought was really cool. They added up the numbers of inspirational words to give them a percentage value. 11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5=96 points or 96%. That word is Knowledge. 8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11=98% gives you the word Hardwork. Which important word equals you 100%?
It is 1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5=100%…. I’ll let you crack that code yourself.
I would imagine that if you could
understand Morse code, a tap dancer
would drive you crazy.
Mitch Hedber
Taste of Home columnist Sandy (Anderson) Holthaus lives on a farm in South Haven, MN with her husband, Michael, and their children Zoe, Jack and Ben. Her heart remains on the North Shore where she grew up with her parents, Art and LaVonne Anderson of Schroeder. She enjoys writing about her childhood and mixes memories with delicious helpings of home-style recipes.
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