When I was in school , especially around the pre-teen and early teen years, one of the biggest things which we kids enjoyed was passing notes, and especially notes that were written in code. One of the big worries of passing notes was that it would be intercepted. Some of the notes were intercepted while being passed during class, and those notes were usually read out loud to the whole class by the teacher. This was quite often very embarrassing to the note writer, and even when they had not signed their name at the bottom, we could guess from the initials, or just from the dismay on the face of the sender of the note. To help prevent this, we often passed notes in between classes; but occasionally, those were accidentally dropped in the hallway, and gleefully grabbed by the next student to find it. This led to kids making up codes and passing notes in that code, and then no one else except the receiver of the note could decipher it and tell what was said. One of the favorite codes that I used was called the Tic-tac-toe Code. It was very easy to use because you actually didn't have to carry a code sheet or memorize anything. To make the code, you drew two tic-tac-toe squares, and put dots in one set of boxes. Then you made two X's and put dots in one set of those. The first squares were (top row) a-b-c-, middle row d-e-f, and bottom row was g-h-i. The second set of squares (with dots) went from j-r, and then you went on to the first X, which was s-t-u-v, and the last X (with dots) was w-x-y-z. So with a little practice, we could actually almost "read" that code without looking it up, and just mentally went through whichever part of the squares or X's if we could not remember the code. It had the advantage of looking really, really strange to anyone who didn't know how we made the code, so people could not easily decipher it if they did not know the secret. Who else wrote notes in code when you were in school ? Was it the girls or the boys who usually did this ?
We wrote and passed notes, Yvonne but not in code. Guess we just took our chances. What got passed around was my good friend Becky's stories...she was a great writer and her stories were similar to the "True Confessions" magazines they had back then. It was mainly the girls that were the note passers!
Yeah, not many guys passed around notes unless of course they got a note which was initiated by the love (infatuation) of their entire life. Normally, those notes would be something regarding a meeting behind the barn, so to speak, which always led to a hasty return by the smitten bo. Now, one high schools that I attended had a little different type of note that the girls passed. They were called, "slam books." Actual books which at first contained blank pages similar to a diary, and at the top of each page was a question. Thinking about it, slam books very well might have been the front runner of a modern day forum for the questions were exactly like thread starters. "What color do you like", or " I think Bobby Cole is hot, what do you think?" were the type of questions one would find when intercepting a slam book. Uh, the girls soon found out that I could not be trusted to merely be the middle person when someone wanted to pass a note or slam book. Inquiring minds need to know and I was an extremely inquisitive kid.