THE BELL CURVE:

Tomorrow will be Pearl Harbor Day — the 66th anniversary of the Japanese attack that brought the United States abruptly into World War II. The ritual game to play among those of us old enough to remember is where-were-you-when-you heard-the-news? But this year’s anniversary reminded me of something quite different, a mystery I’ve carried in my head for more than six decades.

In 1944, I was flying Navy transport planes in the South Pacific. Along with the wounded we carried out of combat areas, we sometimes had military passengers, and I’d go back into the cabin to talk with them when the co-pilot took over. That’s how I met a naval intelligence officer with time to kill and a provocative story about an assignment that had him baffled.

He told me that the Nov. 22, 1941, issue of the New Yorker magazine — two weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor — carried an advertisement that in retrospect was full of double meanings and was seen by the intelligence community as a possible warning to someone about the timing of the upcoming Japanese offensive.

He described the ad as best he could from memory and said it was accompanied by a half-dozen identical small ads showing only a pair of dice with the numbers 12 and 7 — the date of the Pearl Harbor attack — exposed.

His investigation had run into nothing but dead-ends.

He found that the ad had been placed across the counter in New York and paid for in cash.

Both the main ad and the small lead-in ads had been set in type somewhere else and a matrix pulled for delivery to the New Yorker.

The clerk who had accepted the ads had no recollection of who placed them, and neither the board game that was offered in the double-entendre copy nor the company whose signature was on the ad existed.

I never forgot that conversation, and when I returned to college after the war, I went to the library and found bound editions of the New Yorker. Although it was only a half-page ad in a thick magazine, it was easy to spot and every bit as mysterious as the intelligence agent had described it.

The illustration above the ad copy showed an air raid in progress.

Immediately below it, a group of people in an air-raid shelter were playing a dice game.

Under the headline “Uchtung, Warning, Alerte,” the copy began: “We hope you’ll never have to spend a long winter’s night in an air-raid shelter, but we were just thinking it’s only common sense to be prepared. If you’re not too busy between now and Christmas, why not sit down and plan a list of the things you’ll want to have on hand ”

The list that followed concluded with this sentence:

“And though it’s no time, really, to be thinking of what’s fashionable, we bet that most of your friends will remember to include those intriguing dice and chips which make THE DEADLY DOUBLE.” This was followed by the sign of the double cross — two X’s inside a shield — and a tag line that the game was available in department stores everywhere.

Finally, scattered throughout the issue were the small ads showing a pair of dice exposing 12 and 7 — numbers not found on conventional dice — and signed by the Monarch Publishing Company, New York that the intelligence officer told me — along with the game, itself — didn’t exist.

It’s been many years since I tracked down that bound copy of old New Yorkers with its mysterious ads.

But if you’re curious enough, you can do it, too. And if you do, you’ll find the big ad on page 70 and the small ads scattered through the Nov. 22, 1941, issue. Then you can carry the mystery around in your own head as I have done all these years.

There’s another anniversary being remembered this week that is even more mysterious than the New Yorker Pearl Harbor advertisement. And Orange County’s Supt. of Schools Emeritus, John F. Dean, was there when it happened.

On Dec. 5, 1945, five Navy torpedo bombers comprising Flight 19 took off from their Fort Lauderdale, Fla. base on a two-hour navigational instruction flight over a stretch of ocean called the Bermuda Triangle, better known as “the graveyard of the Atlantic” because of the ships that have simply disappeared in that area. The weather was ideal, the flight routine.

But neither the 14 men of Flight 19 nor the 13-man crew of a PBM “flying boat” sent to search for them were ever seen again.

John Dean was a young Navy enlistee training as a TBF tail gunner. His group took off right behind Flight 19, did their gunnery work over the ocean and returned without incident.

As Dean was leaving the hangar, the control tower transmissions were being carried by loudspeakers all over the base, and he listened spellbound to the increasing tension in the messages to Flight 19.

Finally he heard the tower send out instructions for ditching. The planes, inexplicably lost, had run out of fuel. After that, frantic unanswered messages. Then, silence. The next morning, multitudes of search parties could find nothing but a calm sea. No wreckage. No sign of life.

Nothing to suggest reasons for the tragic loss, or even that it had taken place — questions that have never been satisfactorily answered.

Dean’s most vivid recollection of the fragments of that fateful day took place when his group returned from its gunnery flight without incident. Anxious fliers were already gathering in the hangar to listen to the increasingly uneasy messages from the tower.

One of them saw Dean arrive and hurried over to ask him hopefully if he was “one of those guys who were lost.”

Dean has remembered that question on a good many Fifths of December since.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.