On June 28, 1933, Nellie Simmons Meier sat at her desk and cast an expert eye over the imprint before her, searching for telltale signs much as she had done since she first started such readings as a young girl.
Picking up her pen, she began to jot down what she saw. "The length of the palm," she wrote, "indicates the love of physical activity, but the restraining influence shown by the length of the fingers, indicative of carefulness in detail, enables careful preparation toward accomplishing a definite goal."
Meier, an Indianapolis socialite and celebrated palmist, had performed thousands of similar readings, many of them persons of note, from Albert Einstein and Walt Disney to George Gershwin, Eleanor Roosevelt and even Esau II, a chimpanzee from the Belgian Congo.