“Don’t expect/These signs today/Legal eagles/Had their way/Burma-Shave.” ds By 1963, Burma-Shave was sold to Philip Morris, whose legal department put paid to the idea.
No longer were drivers confined to what we’d now call backroads at 35 mph. Just as the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1925 encouraged Burma-Shave signs, its counterpart in 1956 setting up Interstates diminished their efficacy. At 35 mph, it took almost three seconds from sign to sign, 18 seconds of product exposure for the entire set-a lot better than a newspaper or magazine ad received. Typically, the six signs were placed 100 paces apart. Each donor was given a thank you note-and a jar of Burma-Shave. There’s a great-and true-story concerning a satirical jingle: “Free offer! Free offer!/Rip a fender/Off your car/Mail it in for/A half-pound jar.” Enterprising Minnesotans scavenged junkyards and lugged them to Burma-Shave offices. The Fred Allen Texaco Hour had a skit called “The Murder of the Burma-Shave Poet.” It’s said Burma-Shave got more advertising, and free too, than Texaco that time. Bob Hope dedicated a 15-minute routine to them in 1941. The signs were celebrated on radio and television. Image from The Verse by the Side of the Road. Operation Deepfreeze signage poked fun at the nearest combustible tree being a thousand miles away.
Also, South Dakota’s restriction of red to its warning signs meant Burma-Shave messages there were a special white-on-blue. Winding roads, roadside foliage and relatively costly land rentals precluded Massachusetts. Not quite everywhere, however: Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico were deemed too sparse of drivers. By 1929, the spiels had evolved into verse: “Every shaver/Now can snore/Six more Minutes/Than before/By using/Burma-Shave.” Block-letter white-on-red (or black-on-orange, soon discontinued), the six-sign sequences blossomed from Minneapolis to the rest of the Midwest, to the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, to the South and New England. The earliest ones were just straight pitches, “Shave the modern way/Fine for the skin/Druggists have it/Burma-Shave.”Įarly in 1926, the company set up its own sign shop. The first signs for Burma-Shave brushless shaving cream were cobbled up in 1925 and installed along two roads out of Minneapolis. Burma-Shave was a brushless alternative back when whipping up shaving cream in a cup with a brush was a daily activity.
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