September/October 2005

Secret Society

There’s no Special Shake, But You do Need an “Occult Hand” to Get In

By Larry Maddry

When writing for the Chicago Tribune in July 2004, James Janega exposed the Order of the Occult Hand.

He wrote: “For more than two generations in newsrooms around the world, a meaningless, funny and telltale turn of phrase has spread like a cough in a classroom.”

The phrase, he said, involves eight words that defy definition and are as intangible as smoke: “It was as if an occult hand had ... ”

Janega said the eight words sound as if they mean something but don’t. Yet they have been “slyly and widely put to use for most of the past 40 years, intentionally, all over the world.”

Isn’t it amazing how many great ideas are hatched in bars ... or in the presence of a bottle?

It seems the phrase originated with Joseph Flanders, then an employee for The Charlotte News. He had typed: “It was as if an occult hand had reached down from above and moved the players like pawns upon some giant chessboard.”

In the fall of 1965, Flanders’ friends at The Charlotte News, especially writer R. C. Smith, were so taken with Flanders’ phrase they formed a society—the Order of the Occult Hand—and vowed to get the words “it was as if an occult hand ... ” into print as soon as possible.

Janega said the “occult hand” phrase arrived at The New York Times in 1974, found The Washington Times four times from 1996 to 1988, appeared in the Los Angeles Times eight times between 1984 and 1999, slipped into The Boston Globe nine times from 1987 to 2000, slithered into the Chicago Tribune in 1996, snuck into The Washington Post in 1997 and even reached the Bangkok Post in 2004.

Now let us turn back the unoccult clock hands to January of this year. I received a call from Mary Curro of Portsmouth, who let me know of my membership in the Order of the Occult Hand. She said she’d get a copy of Janega’s article and mail it to me.

Her letter and the article arrived days later. Sure enough, I was credited with having used the phrase in a story printed in The Virginian-Pilot. When I wrote the phrase, I had no intention of fooling editors and earning membership in the order. I’d obviously heard it somewhere and thought it had the voltage of an electric chair. To me, it sounded like a phrase minted by a master of English. If not Dickens ... perhaps Mark Twain. Whatever the source, the phrase stuck in my brain like airplane glue to balsa wood.

I was delighted Mary Curro mailed me the article. In her letter she noted that she painted an occult hand in red and black for the Order of the Occult Hand. She also mentioned J.A.C. Dunn, another Tar Heel writer, smuggled the painting into the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte. Then it mysteriously disappeared—as occult hands tend to do, she explained.

When I read Janega’s article on the “OOH,” I was awed by the company I was keeping—in print. In 1997, M.R. “Monty” Montgomery of The Boston Globe inserted the occult hand in a story about strife at Boston University. “If a president of Harvard ever intervenes in something like a promotion or a course outline, it is well disguised, the work of an occult hand.”

“The next day Larry Maddry used it in a story at The Virginian-Pilot,” Janega wrote. (A column about a disappearing golf ball, which landed on the green but vanished as if snatched by a you know what.)

Janega said the same summer Linton Weeks at The Washington Post used the phrase in a story about bowling, and Montgomery of The Boston Globe used it four times in his newspaper. He also said he fears the era of the occult hand or what it represents may be over. “There’s so much bad writing and so much pretentious writing, I’m afraid it would get lost,” he said.

“It was always supposed to sound bad,” he added.

His last line shocked me. An occult hand can get the wood chopped before a mysterious hand or a sinister hand can spit on itself.

Janega has shown the phrase travels well and far. And now that Halloween is approaching, it’s more useful than an American Express card.

No good writer should leave home without it.