Mystery Card

Here’s a little mystery you might be able to help solve. Reader, Carl W’s friend’s grandfather was a police officer who dies in the 1930’s in a shootout with some bank robbers. Which is how I imagine most police officers in the 1930s dying. That or this.

In his wallet they found this card. But no one seems to know what it means.

Do you have any idea? I’ll give a prize to the first one who gives me an accurate answer. What will the prize be? I don’t know. Let’s say it’s $2. That way you can only be pleasantly surprised with whatever you get beyond that.

Now, while it looks like it might be something fun and mysterious, there’s also a chance it’s a Ku Klux Klan membership card. And no, I’m not kidding about that. At least that’s the suspicion some people have. Although I’m not sure if that’s based on anything other than the fact that it was found in the wallet of some guy in the 1930s. Wallets used to come with a special slot for your KKK membership card back then.

It’s obviously something strange—it’s not something that you get punched 10 times for a free sub sandwich—but what is it? If you have any insight, please send it my way and I’ll pass it along.

It does remind me of those “pocket mentalism” cards that people sell. I’ve never been a huge fan of those, because—despite what they might be dressed up as—they very often look like a prop for a magic trick. However, if you had something that looked old and weathered and you said, “We found this in my grandfather’s wallet after he died. I carried it around with me for years before realizing something strange about it…,” that could be a cool presentation. Perhaps I’ll work on that.

[Update: So far the most common guess is that the boxes represent some sort of gestures. For example, second column, in second box down: wipe brow, pinch left ear (with words written incorrectly as well as backwards). One guess that has come up a few times is that these gestures might be baseball signs. But I can almost guarantee they’re not that. (Although I’ll double the prize to 4 whole dollars, if that turns out to be the case.) When you see a third-base coach giving signs, they look complicated, but they’re not. They just bury the signals in a lot of decoy movements. You would never have signs so convoluted that you needed this sort of card to keep track of them. And we know what the signs in baseball represent (steal, bunt, take, hit and run, delayed steal, etc.). We should be able to find them in some form on this card. It wouldn't make sense to have a card of gestures without indicating what they mean, even if that’s coded too. But more importantly, how big is this baseball team that you’re printing up specially made cards in the 1930s? You got 25 guys on the team. You’d just have them write the signs down and take five minutes to learn them. You wouldn’t go to Ye Olde Vistaprint.]