Readers of my book “A Place Called Home” may recall a story therein about a long-gone part of American culture created by a Minnesota company called Burma-Shave, a brand of brushless shaving cream.
What follows here is a second chapter of that story.
Starting in 1925, the Burma-Shave company created and installed a series of small red signs with white letters bordering two highways leading out of Minneapolis. The signs were the brainchild of Allan Odell, son of the company founder, Clinton Odell.
The first few sets of signs were written by the Odell family, but before long the company started an annual contest encouraging people to submit new versed jingles, with winners receiving a $100 prize.
Sales of the product soon rose dramatically, with signs spreading all over the country.
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Within a decade, Burma-Shave was the second most popular brand of shaving cream nationwide, with some 7,000 sets of signs scattered along U.S. highways. The yearly contests for new roadside poems often received over 50,000 entries.
The jingles contained either four or five lines of verse, followed by the company name.
Each sign contained a single line, and the signs were usually spaced a hundred feet apart, bordering a farmer’s field. The words of each verse were in capital letters to allow passing motorists to easily read them:
IN CUPID’S LITTLE
BAG OF TRIX
HERE’S THE ONE
THAT CLIX
WITH CHIX
Burma-Shave
Many of the winning verses were gently humorous, such as:
HENRY THE EIGHTH
SURE HAD TROUBLE
SHORT-TERM WIVES
LONG-TERM STUBBLE
But some contained automotive safety warnings:
IF DAISIES ARE YOUR
FAVORITE FLOWER
KEEP PUSHIN’ UP THOSE
MILES-PER-HOUR
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Most of the verses touted the advantage of using the product:
THE WOLF
IS SHAVED
SO NEAT AND TRIM
RED RIDING HOOD
IS CHASING HIM
While some were simply commonsense observations:
MANY A FOREST
USED TO STAND
WHERE A LIGHTED MATCH
GOT OUT OF HAND
As roads got better and speeds increased, the space between the signs also grew larger, but the effectiveness of the rhymed verses proved undeniable, so much so that the Burma-Shave company was spared the downturns that other companies endured through the Great Depression.
The entertaining signs helped make long journeys more entertaining, and people had become addicted to reading them:
THE BEARDED LADY
TRIED A JAR
SHE’S NOW A FAMOUS
MOVIE STAR
But all good things must come to an end, and after World War II, increasing costs and decreasing sales began to be felt by the company. People were traveling ever faster, times were changing and large billboards began to dominate the roadsides.
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Eventually, in 1963, the company was sold to Philip Morris to become an operating division of American Safety Razor Products. Some years later a set of signs was donated to the Smithsonian Institution to preserve this once widespread part of Americana.
But in the memories of many, the joy of reading the passing signs lives on:
SHE EYED
HIS BEARD
AND SAID NO DICE
THE WEDDING’S OFF
I’LL COOK THE RICE
Burma-Shave
Collections of Craig Nagel’s columns are available at CraigNagelBooks.com.
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