Ovaltine secret messages
When Ralphie copies down the numbers to the secret message from Orphan Annie and goes to the bathroom to decode it, he finds that it is really a ad to drink Ovaltine. This is a urban legend about the Orphan Annie/Captain Midnight Decoder badge which has been around for a while. First of all, it was a badge, not a ring as is often described. There was a safety pin on the back and if it was a ring, you would have to stick the pin through the skin on your hand to wear it...and Mom would definitely be mad. Officially it was known as a Decodergraph using the 26 letters of the alphabet to set up a series of codes. While Pierre Andre, the announcer of the Orphan Annie show, implied that the secret message had something to do with the outcome of the next day's episode, it usually was a general message regarding safety or manners. The legend of the secret Ovaltine commercial got started in an Esquire Magazine article in 1960, later reprinted in the forward of "A Pictorial History of Radio" The author was a television executive talking about television's advancement to a group of senior citizens who wanted to know why they couldn't have good old time radio shows anymore. In talking about the Ovaltine Decoder, he mentions that the message was usually a plug for Ovaltine. Obviously Shepherd saw this article or heard someone mention it, and included in his story. There is a website where you can decode messages from different years using the original code setup. None of these messages are commercial. But it makes a better story than the truth.