Stick Man

Three small figures. Two are exactly the same, but even with so little to differentiate the stark stick figures, the message is powerful. So powerful, it can save lives.

Yes, it’s true. There is such a thing as life-saving stick men. To understand their key role in saving lives, it’s important to understand that codes and ciphers are forms of cryptography.

That’s right -- Cryptography.

It comes from two Greek words: Kryptos, meaning hidden and Graphia meaning writing. Hidden Writing. A way to transform messages into a series of symbols that are intelligible only to specific recipients.

It’s a simple, but yet effective, mysterious code. It been called the stick men code, acrobat code, or as Sherlock Holmes, another great detective called them – dancing men. It doesn’t matter how you wish to refer to them, the premise is the same. There are twenty-six figures in all, each representing a specific letter of the alphabet. For the purposes of this story, there are only two that matter. The running figure and the hands-at-the-waist figure with a crooked leg.

 

 

What do they mean? They stand for S. O. S. The international distress signal.

Some people argue SOS is an acronym for Save Our Ship. Others insist it’s the abbreviation for Save Our Souls. It really doesn’t matter because it means “Help!” As in help is needed immediately. When it comes to SOS many people automatically think of Dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot. But that’s an entirely different sort of code, Morse code, and not nearly as mysterious as the stick men.

In this case, the specific recipient of the distress signal was one Jim Frayne. To be absolutely official about it, James Winthrop Frayne II. A fifteen-year-old All-American youth.

Jim is a handsome guy, knowledgeable and often serious. He’s a loyal friend, and while at times he may appear to be an expert at everything, he does have a bit of a temper and can be quite stubborn. Fortunately, Jim Frayne understood the mysterious code.

But let me go back to when the story began. It started with a group of teenagers and their project to raise funds to benefit a charity and at the same time save their club. At the time our tale takes place, the club consisted of a group of six teenagers, an assorted mixture of males and females as well as neighbors. They lived further out of town than most of their classmates and within walking distance of each other. They bonded together over a mystery and this group of brothers, sisters, friends, and neighbors decided to form a club they dubbed The Bob-Whites of the Glen. Bob-Whites for short, or the BWG’s for even shorter. The name came from the whistle that Jim Frayne taught Honey and Trixie, when he first met them – the distinctive sound of the bobwhite quail. You could say that whistle was their first code.

Trixie Belden was the leader of the Bob-Whites and a teenage mystery magnet. Technically, she’s the co-president of the club along with Jim Frayne. Her best friend and Jim’s sister, Honey Wheeler, is the vice president. There are a lot of officers of the club that originally only had five members because Mart Belden was held the combined role of secretary-treasurer. At the time this story unfolds however, there are six members and the main purpose of the club is to help others. All this helping of other people takes place while attending school, having fun riding horses, taking trips and of course solving mysteries.

Solving mysteries is one of the ways the Bob-Whites help people, besides you can’t have a mysterious code without a mystery. The mystery that prompted this particular adventure was a school break-in and the theft of money from the principal’s desk. Fifteen dollars is apparently a fairly serious crime in this town. Severe enough for the school principal and the school board to be driven nearly crazy. Yes, Sleepyside is indeed a sleepy little town. The biggest problem facing educators in the town is petty theft and minor incidents of vandalism. Besides that, the town’s educational leadership really seemed to believe they could tell a private non-school-sponosored club they had to disband. Have they never heard of freedom of assembly? Apparently a red cloth jacket with B.W.G. cross-stitched on the back sent irrational fears of uncontrollable gangs through the hearts of the bureaucrats in Sleepyside-on-the-Hudson. All twenty-six of the stick men are shaking their heads over that one, but enough about the educational system in New York State, this story is about the mysterious code.

Threatened with the challenge that unless they could prove their worth to the community the school board would ask them to disband, the members of the club came up with an idea to raise money to support an internationally recognized charity. A successful fundraiser would send the right message to a group of government educational bureaucrats. If that message was to butt-out of their private club business, well they would send it in the nicest way possible – by means of an antique show to benefit children around the world. Who could object to that? And after all, who doesn’t like antiques?

This club of teenagers could plan along with the best professional fundraisers, mostly because they weren’t afraid of hard work. A well-organized and successful fundraiser would demonstrate to the misguided Board of Education that they were a viable civic club, providing value to the community both at home and abroad.

Thanks to help from their extensive network of friends and family, the club received donations of items to sell at the show as well as display. The proceeds of these sales would be added to the price of admission to the show. The Bob-Whites worked hard, restoring old broken furniture, making aprons and rag dolls, and along the way they found more minor mysteries. The antique show was shaping up to be a topnotch event. However, the Bob-Whites were plagued by petty crimes along the way. A desk was stolen, their clubhouse was broken into, and samurai swords and silver were targed for theft. That was when the mysterious code came into the picture.

It was while gathering donations for the antique show that this group of teenagers stumbled across a key with an attached tag. They discovered it in the Wheelers’ attic. On the tag was a group of acrobat stick figures. It didn’t take Trixie long, only until the very next day, to uncover a magazine with the entire alphabet of stick figures – a code the magazine called the Acrobatic Alphabet.

Of course, our teenage sleuth being who she was, it didn’t take her anytime at all to decipher the tag on the key. A search of the attic revealed an old doll’s trunk that the key fit, and inside the trunk was a music box. This musical mystery was solved rather quickly and it resulted in some good publicity for the antique show as well. Some people thought the involvement of the stick men, or acrobatic alphabet would end there, but those people were wrong.

Mart Belden, Trixie’s almost-twin, was the one who came up with the idea of using the acrobatic alphabet for a club code. He suggested that if anyone were to get into trouble, they’d send a message in code and the club members would come to the rescue. That said, I don’t think he ever thought it would be used so soon, although it turned out to be quite effective.

You see, those Bob-Whites—the crazy gang that strikes fear into the hearts of the board of education—they did learn the code, and in particular they learned the SOS. It was a choice that turned out to have consequences beyond their wildest expectations.

After a couple of encounters with thieves, meeting a Rip van Winkle character, foreign intrigue, being lost in a blizzard, and a Valentine’s Party -- complete with a teenage girl’s first orchid, the antique show began to take shape. The showroom was located on Main Street, in a space donated by the Sleepyside Bank. All the valuable antiques that were donated for display, along with the items for sale, looked better than many museum arrangements.

Trixie, along with her oldest brother Brian and their friend Jim, decided to keep an eye on the storefront the night before the Antique Show. They all had an uneasy feeling that the crooks they’d already encountered would try again.

Watching became tedious and our teenage sleuth managed to convince the others she could be productive while keeping an eye on the antiques. Trixie was working to put price tags on the dolls and aprons that would be sold at the show, while her brother and friend watched—along with the town cop—from a spot across the street. As she diligently tagged stuffed toys, Trixie found herself in the middle of a heist. Jim showed up to check on her right in the middle of the crime, but with a gun trained on her, Trixie was unable to warn him about what was going down. She couldn’t use the Bobwhite whistle. That sort of sound would tip the crooks off immediately. But she could draw those three little stick figures on the tags. Being one smart kid, despite her brother Mart’s arguments at times to the contrary, she was able to slip those tags with the message into Jim’s coat pocket. She tried to get him to look while he was there, but in the end, it worked out better with him finding the message after he left.

Jim discovered those tags in the nick of time, and the friendly neighborhood Spiderman, I mean cop, Spider Webster—but really with that name, you’d almost think he was Spiderman—arrived just in time to save the antiques—and more importantly, to save Trixie from a lonely ride-along with the crooks who had no interest in letting her live to tell her tale. It wasn’t the first time he’d been involved in saving Trixie from danger! Is it any wonder it makes you suspicious that he’s really Spiderman?

Of course the antique show was a success. A considerable sum was raised for UNICEF, and the school principal and members of the school board acted as if the entire event were their idea. Typical of bureaucrats, right?

But the real message in the story is the value of codes and cryptography. People have used cryptography for more than 3,000 years to keep comunications secret. All you need to write your own mysterious code is an algorithm and a key to enrypt and then decrypt the information. It could be as simple as a substitution cipher where 1=A, 2=B, etc. Perhaps you prefer a shift cipher such as the one used by Julius Ceaser. It could be as complicated as Kryptos, currently on display at the Central Intelligence Agency, and never fully-solved. You may not even realize you use a secret code every time you access an ATM machine. Whatever the reason, and whatever the need, it’s useful to know mysterious codes, beause you never know when you may need to keep a secret, or when a secret code might just save your life. And if you don’t believe me, why just ask Trixie Belden!