Whenever my family took a road trip or just a drive out in the country, I was always on the lookout for the familiar red and white signs along the roadsides that had a humorous jingle printed on them with the final sign reading “Burma-Shave.” I never saw the signs inside the city limits of a town; they were strictly a rural oddity. The reason for this, I imagine, was that many country folk didn’t have television back in the middle decades of the twentieth century and thus, no commercials. The Burma-Shave signs with their printed ditties was a clever way of getting their product advertised to the general public without a lot of capital investment.
Burma-Shave was a man’s brushless shaving cream that was put on the market in 1925 by the Burma-Vita Company’s founder, Clinton Odell. It was the principal product of the Minneapolis-based company and the shaving cream, along with its humorous signage, flourished until 1963 when the Burma-Vita Company was sold to Phillip Morris, Inc., and it decided to discontinue the signs.
The signs were a suggestion of Odell’s son, Allan, who, with the help of his younger brother, Leonard, painted the slogans on scrap lumber, white letters on a red background. Six signs, spaced about a hundred feet apart, gave drivers plenty of time to read the messages, which the whole family would read in chorus. Farmers were approached to rent small strips of roadside land to put the signs on and were paid anywhere from three to twenty-five dollars a year. The boys dug postholes to put the signs in place and the sales of Burma-Shave began to boom!
Over the years more than 7,000 sets of signs were erected in forty-four states and were replaced with new jingles each year. The company ran a national contest to get the jingles, paying one hundred dollars for the ones used. Some years they got more than 50,000 entries.
A few of the romantic slogans went like this:
HIS FACE WAS SMOOTH
AND COOL AS ICE
AND OH LOUISE!
HE SMELLED
SO NICE
BURMA-SHAVE
BEFORE I TRIED IT
THE KISSES
I MISSED
BUT AFTERWARD—BOY!
THE MISSES I KISSED
BURMA-SHAVE
Romance jingles were just too sissified for the kids. They preferred the signs promoting safe driving:
HARDLY A DRIVER
IS NOW ALIVE
WHO PASSED
ON HILLS
AT 75
BURMA-SHAVE
DON’T STICK
YOUR ELBOW
OUT SO FAR
IT MIGHT GO HOME
IN ANOTHER CAR
BURMA-SHAVE
Then came World War II:
“AT EASE,” SHE SAID.
“MANEUVERS BEGIN
WHEN YOU GET
THOSE WHISKERS
OFF YOUR CHIN.”
BURMA-SHAVE
The war quickened the pace of American life. Postwar automobiles were capable of higher speeds, postwar roads were wider. Driving in the fast lane of highways made it harder to read the Burma-Shave signs. Worse, the airplane was attracting many travelers:
‘TWOULD BE
MORE FUN
TO GO BY AIR
IF WE COULD PUT
THESE SIGNS UP THERE
BURMA-SHAVE.
After Phillip Morris decided to discontinue the signs, rather than leave them to decay, the sign crews went about the country one last time and took down every sign. That, they felt, was a proper token of respect for an American institution that lasted just short of forty years.
