Posted by Ed Kiser on December 21, 1998 at 20:35:43:
Education-What AR has done to get us to learn without realizing he was
teaching us.
There are many things I feel I have learned from the reading of AR.
Perhaps others would like to add comments as to what they think they
learned from the reading of these series.
I wish to specify a particular item that I learned as a child, that of the
two-handed semiphore code, as shown by the dancing stick figures. My best
friend of those childhood days and I siezed upon AR's drawings of those
stick figures demonstrating the alphabet. We learned it; we used it.
Holding a hanky in each hand, we would stand at opposite sides of a field
and wag back and forth (with some shouting also) to practice this
signalling. When time came for me to be old enough to go to the Boy
Scouts, this led to an easy merit badge, because the skill was already
learned. Those stick figures where handy for passing notes back and forth
in school, with a feeling that no one outside of the "in" crowd could
understand what we were doing. Now, some fifty years later, my friend and
I have gone our separate ways, but there is that exchange of the yearly
Christmas card, with always some note scribbled on it, which is OF COURSE
written in the dancing men code. It keeps that memory alive of a carefree
time, a wonderous time, a time of adventure with the Swallows and Amazons.
One thing I have wondered about, and that is, even though the S&A used
Morse code, such as the signalling by Dick of "NP" that Nancy read from
Beckfoot in WH, or the torch signalling from the gulch to the camp in PP, I
do not recall that AR ever gave us the Morse code as a table as he had done
the Semiphore code. This code is of course available elsewhere, but I just
wondered why he gave his readers one code but not the key to the other.
Was it given, and I just don't remember where he did it?