by John H. Lienhard at the University of Houston
Advertising, like pun-making, is human ingenuity of a kind
we all love to hate. When it's good, it creates folklore. It
helps us define ourselves. God help us if we can't ignore adver-
tising. But it would be a grave error to ignore it utterly.
Each summer before WW-II my family made a great automobile
journey through the American West. The car ground its way through
Laramie, Kanab, Bozeman, and Santa Rosa. Endless empty 2-lane
highways marched through Nebraska, climbed the Colorado moun-
tains, and offered sleep in a 2-dollar, one-room cottage with a
stove and a detached privy.
Those roads held one delight we never forgot. Every hour or
so we'd pass a string of six red signs, each with a few words of
doggerel.
Burma-Shave signs were as surely the mark of the American
landscape as windmills, barns and purple mountains in the dis-
tance. They delighted us from 1927 'til 1963. Then Burma-Shave
sold out to Phillip Morris and their good-humored verve left us.
It was all the work of the Odell family in Minneapolis.
Grandpa Odell was a lawyer. He sold liniment on the side -- said
he'd got it from a sea captain. Maybe he did. Sea captains once
trafficked in nostrums from exotic lands. Then Odell's son,
Clinton, formed a company and got serious about selling liniment.
Clinton put his two sons, Leonard and Allan, onto the idea
of creating a brushless shaving cream. They worked with a com-
pany chemist and stirred up some 300 recipes. Finally they made
one that really worked. They took it to market.
That was 1925. By 1927, they'd put out their first set of
signs. They didn't have the rhythm at first. This one said,
All that changed in the 1930s. The signs developed their
kinky humor and surprise endings. Here's one from the history
of shaving:
Those playful red signs helped teach kids like me to read.
They may've saved lives with their safety messages.
Today, most of us do use brushless shaving creams. More
than that, those signs really did shape America's sense of self.
And those of us over 35 will all smile at this one:
I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston, where we're
interested in the way inventive minds work.
Rowsome, F., Jr., The Verse by the Side of the Road, New York:
The Stephen Grene Press/Pelham Books, 1965, 1990.
Some seven hundred Burma-Shave verses are known. Here's a
quick sampling in roughly chronological sequence.
