2511 Cypress St.
Columbia, S.C.
May 21, 1939

Dear Mr. Annemann :

It all started when Jenny Gayden called and asked if
I’d come to her party that night. During the afternoon
I went over to the neighborhood where Jenny lived and
scouted around. At several filling stations, drug stores,
and an all night restaurant I took down their telephone
numbers along with names and addresses. Back home,
in front of my own phone, I did some heavy figuring.
Under each of the dial holes wherein you put your finger
is a number and above each number are three letters of
the alphabet in series. Now taking one of the numbers I
had found on my trip — it was JA-2654 — I looked for the
J on the dial. I found it along with the letters K and L.
Now I could write down either one of these three letters
I chose. Following this (take L, for example) I looked for
A, the letter next in the original phone number. I found it
with B and C. I wrote down A after the letter L (although
I could have written down either B or C). The next part
of the original number was the figure 2. Above the 2 on
the dial were the letters ABC again. This time I put down
B. Then I went to the 6, put down one of the letters above
it, and did the same thing with the numbers 5 and 4.

This resulted in me having a “word” which looked like this :
LABOLI. If I had dialed the “word” first dialing L, then A, then
B and so on, actually I would merely have dialed the perfectly
legitimate number JA-2654.

Now I went down my acquired list making “words” out of telephone
numbers and pretty soon by watching the combinations of letters
I found that I had formed a recognized English word ! I looked the
word in a dictionary, copied down the page number and position,
and got ready to force it that night. Then I let Dave (my roommate)
in on the set-up, and asked him to help me.

The party began to lag and Jenny asked if I would do some tricks.
I go for my stuff and locate Dave by the punch bowl with a blonde
who had blown in from Nashville. He sneaks out the back way and
scoots over to the place whose “telephone number-word” I am
going to force. He explains he’s waiting for a call and stands by.
Back at the party I work the dictionary test, eventually predicting
the word on a couple of silicate flaps (Jacob Daley, Jinx Winter
1935-1936 Extra). Everything then gets quiet and I talk about
coincidence and extra-sensory perception. I spring the idea about
calling someone up at random and have them call out a name at
random which they might pick out of a phone book. Jenny likes
the idea. Sadie Jennings, who helped with the dictionary trick,
calls up, and to make it all very fair (?) she uses the word we
just got through predicting. I show her how to dial using
letters and she has a lot of fun doing it.

When the phone rings, Dave, at the other end, holds
his handkerchief over the mouthpiece and answers it.
Sadie explains she’s doing special research work
at the university and would he be kind enough
to pick any name at random from his phone
book and read it to her.

Dave stalls and has her make it very clear. He waits a moment or
two and then says back “Miss Sadie Jennings, living at 3104 Oak
Terrace”. Sadie nearly fainted before she could hang up and tell
everybody about it. Naturally Dave knew before he left just who I
was going to work on for the dictionary trick.

Since then I’ve played around with the idea of making words out
of numbers and run into many combinations and strange words
that at first glance one wouldn’t think could be in a dictionary.

Sincerely