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 of Father is here...he's as fat as a pig: Postcards from Maine: 1900-1920. It would be some of the last puzzles he ever solved, as he passed away shortly after sending this letter. Here is a look at those cards through the eyes of a professional editor and Signal Corps veteran.
Postcard I: The Newark Cipher (Portland, ME)
The first card featured a view of the Portland Post Office. In the right margin sat a tiny string of just 11 symbols. To a cryptanalyst, short codes are a nightmare because they lack the data needed for standard frequency counts.
The System: Uncle David recognized the "tic-tac-toe" style of a pigpen cipher, but his training told him this was specifically a Newark cipher.
The Logic: Unlike a standard pigpen, it uses three separate matrices—one with one dot per cell, one with two, and one with three—to account for every letter in the alphabet.
The Twist: To write the message, the sender had to give the card a quarter-turn clockwise.
The Reveal: "I AM SO LON(E)LY."
Uncle David noted that the letter "E" was a bit of a mess—likely because the postmark ink from the other side had bled through—but he was confident enough to "bet a buck" he had it right.
Postcard II: "Ahem, So Romantic" (Skowhegan, ME)
This 1912 card from Skowhegan used a numeric code (1=A, 2=B, etc.). Even though some of the ciphertext had been "scraped off" the card over the years, Uncle David used his editorial intuition to recover the context through the surviving numbers.
The message was a whirlwind update from a correspondent named Grace to a Mr. William True:
The Reveal: "HOW G(O)ES EVERYTHING IN M.S. GOT YOUR LETTER YESTERDAY GOW [HOW] IS YOUR COLD SISTER IS GOING HOME TOMORROW WOULD LIKE AWFUL WELL TO BE IN MERCER SAT. NIGHT WRITE SAT. NIGHT SO ON GRACE AHEM SO ROMANTIC."
Uncle David got a kick out of Grace’s flair for the dramatic, especially her "Ahem" sign-off.
Postcard III: The "Dearest Auntie" Challenge
The final card was what Uncle David called a "real challenge." He had to enlarge the card on a photocopy machine and spend multiple sessions staring at it before he found a "wedge" into the code.
The sender had created a custom alphabet by stripping parts away from capital block letters. An "A" was just a horizontal bar (the crossbar); a "B" looked like a "3" (a capital B without the vertical spine). Once he cracked the logic, a poignant family story from "Gussie" emerged:
The Reveal: "MONDAY, MY DEAREST AUNTIE. THIS IS BABE'S TENTH DAY AND HE AND HIS MOTHER ARE BOTH FEELING LOVELY... HE HAS BEEN SUCH A GOOD BABY SINCE HE BEGAN TO NURSE... YOU WILL BE SORRY TO KNOW OUR CAT FLUFFY IS DEAD. SHE DIED IN THE NIGHT AND MALCOM FOUND HER THE NEXT DAY."
It’s a perfect "postcard" moment—the joy of a newborn recorded right alongside the tragedy of the family cat.
A Final Word from the Editor
True to his nature, Uncle David couldn't help but rib me for the "workload" I’d sent his way. He closed his letter with a classic editorial remark:
"Now if you think I have belabored all of this IT IS YOUR FAULT! It was you who said to me... that I should write an article about secret message postcards."
Uncle David’s 2014 letter remains a treasured piece of my collection. It is a reminder that postcards aren't just about the pictures on the front—they are about the human secrets hidden in the margins, just waiting for someone with enough patience and Signal Corps training to find them. I have some of his earlier postcard deciphering work saved away somewhere, and hope to post some of those here in the future.
Here's a link to the original letter [pdf] and some of the other coded cards that Uncle David cracked.
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