The Editor’s Final Assignment: Uncle David and the Secret Messages of Maine For nearly thirty years, my Uncle David (David T. Galloway) was an editor at the Providence Journal . To his colleagues, he was a master of the copy desk; to me, he was the man who could crack any code. Uncle David’s obsession with "secret writing" wasn't just a hobby; it was a skill forged in the U.S. Army Signal Corps . Stationed in Germany in the 1950s, he developed a fascination with cryptology that turned into a fifty-year pursuit. He was a man of meticulous detail—a trait that served him well both in the newsroom and when staring down a complex cipher. Whenever I found a vintage postcard with a coded message, I knew exactly where to send it. He wouldn’t just send back a translation; he would send a multi-page, handwritten report documenting the methodology, the history of the cipher, and usually a few editorial grumbles about the sender's penmanship. In January 2014, I sent him a copy o...
