A number of urban legends urge people to take some action. Legends inspire people to oppose a proposed ban on religious broadcasting, to apply for a veterans insurance dividend, and to save pop tops from aluminum cans for a supposed redemption offer. People hear the stories, then do what they suggest, not realizing that the stories’ claims are completely spurious.
A more subtle pattern of suggestion is found in the urban legend that I call “The Dishonest Note.” The story describes a course of action that is both illegal and unethical but apparently has been taken by at least four people.
Here’s what happens. A man accidentally drives into a parked vehicle, causing a big dent in the rear fender. Though several bystanders have witnessed the accident, the owner of the damaged car is not around. The guilty driver writes a note, slips it under the wiper blade, and drives off. Presumably, the note is an apology and supplies the guilty driver’s name, address, and insurance company. But when the owner of the damaged car returns, he finds this note: “The people watching me think I am leaving my name and address. But I’m not.”
The earliest example I have of the Dishonest Note appeared in the San Francisco Examiner
in the summer of 1963, in a column written by Herb Caen. Then in the fall, Caen reported a variation he had read in the London Daily Mirror
. In the variation, British car terminology was used—“wing” for “fender,” “windscreen” for “windshield,” etc.—and the note was a bit longer. Caen commented: “Here we have incontrovertible evidence of a new legend that seems destined to go ’round the world
and pass into the folklore of our time.”
I agree, because I have heard versions of the story from at least a dozen people, most of whom clearly regarded the story as fictional. Some said that they had heard it God-knows-where—perhaps on the radio (Paul Harvey was mentioned). Some thought they remembered reading it in Reader’s Digest
. One person identified the story as occurring in a scene of the TV detective series “The Outsider,” which aired in 1968 and 1969. His letter furnished so many specific details from the actual episode that I felt he was a true television buff and couch potato and knew whereof he spoke, though I could not track down the episode.
So it seemed that the print and broadcast media had interacted with oral tradition to spread the story of the dishonest note. There’s nothing unusual about that.
But I was surprised to also hear recently from four people who described real-life events resembling the legend, occurring in different parts of the country over more than a decade. All of them purported to be firsthand or secondhand accounts.
One man, writing from southern California said that his father’s car had been hit and damaged by another driver’s vehicle at a Little League baseball game in 1968. Fans in the stands witnessed the accident. The note under the wiper blade said, simply, “Sorry.”
An attorney in Alaska wrote that in the early 1970s he had represented a young man in a hit-and-run case. The man had left a note reading, “Sorry, you lose! Ha, ha!” on a car that he had accidentally damaged. But a witness, for some reason suspicious of the young man, had jotted down his license number, and the hit-and-run driver was apprehended.
Another Alaskan offered a variant, dating from the late 1970s. A policeman whom he knew had witnessed a fender-bender on the highway. The policeman was too
far away to read the license number, but when he arrived at the scene of the accident and read the dishonest note, he radioed to an officer parked on the highway ahead, describing the getaway car and telling him to pull the offender over.
The fourth respondent claimed that the incident happened to his cousin at a ski area in New England. The cousin found his car damaged in the parking lot, and the usual dishonest note was attached.
The behavior described in “The Dishonest Note” is such a nasty thing to do that one hopes the story is just a legend. But the expense and embarrassment caused by auto accidents are perhaps great enough to compel some people to leave such a note.
So far, nobody has shown me the actual note or even a photocopy of it. But—come to think of it—what would that prove?
What seems most likely is that “The Dishonest Note” first spread as a plausible legend, aided by the print and broadcast media. Later, people who had heard the legend acted in the same way when they found themselves in a similar situation.