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A Burma-Shave Sign Reader Remembers Roads Gone By

By Dorothy Evans

Did I just hear somebody say, "Bring Back Burma-Shave?"

A front page editorial in The Newtown Bee recently blasted the R.J. Reynolds

tobacco company and its ad agency for tasteless billboard copy seen on Mount

Pleasant Road and South Main Street. Many Newtown residents expressed similar

disgust at the blatant use of bathroom humor to promote cigarette smoking

among young people, and they resented the fact that R.J. Reynolds had

"interrupted our landscape" for the purpose of selling a harmful, addictive

and potentially deadly product.

I wondered how many people not only agreed with those sentiments, but also

paused a moment to think back 40 years ago (or in some cases, much longer)

when we actually enjoyed reading billboards that regularly interrupted our

landscape -- those ubiquitous Burma-Shave signs.

As my own memory kicked in, the familiar image of that brush-script

Burma-Shave logo floated before my eyes. Once again, I was a child growing up

in Minnesota, riding in my father's "woody" station wagon, sitting beside him

in the passenger seat. We were headed north on two-lane highway 40 on some

errand of his, not talking much, just concentrating on the road ahead.

I remember feeling mesmerized by the sight of the open road unfolding

endlessly in front of the hood and by the corn fields streaming by. With the

window down, even at 35 mph it felt like we were going fast. Slightly

wall-eyed, I was working hard to watch both the horizon and the passing

landscape at the same time -- on the lookout for Burma-Shave signs.

As soon as we spied those trademark signs coming up, we slowed down and

shouted out the verse written on each of five or six red rectangles,

determined not to miss anything since there was always a pun included and a

joke at the end. If the joke was a clever one, we laughed out loud.

Here are some examples of typical Burma-Shave humor, excerpted from a

wonderful little book, The Verse By the Side of the Road, by Frank Rowsome,

Jr, Stephen Greene Press, New York, 1965.

No lady likes / To dance / Or dine / Accompanied by / A porcupine./ Burma-

Shave

Past schoolhouses / Take it slow / Let the little / Shavers grow./ Burma-

Shave

It's best for / One who hits / the bottle / To let another / Use the

throttle./ Burma-Shave

A girl / Should hold on / To her youth / But not / When he's driving./

Burma-Shave

From 1925 to 1963, millions of us delighted in reading those jaunty phrases.

They were written to advertise brushless shaving cream, but we loved them for

so much more. They poked fun at adults but were never nasty. Women were

portrayed as fickle or faithful depending upon the state of their men's chins.

Men were usually seen as bristly and uncouth -- generally needing good sound

advice and guidance in all matters, including their shaving habits.

From Minnesota to Mississippi and from Connecticut to California, families

chanted those roadside verses or made up their own during the signless

stretches of road. More than 7,000 sets of Burma-Shave signs eventually

covered 43 states, and the verses were frequently changed by the advertising

agency so we never got Burma-Shave bored.

It was a sad day, indeed, when the last Burma-Shave sign came down in 1963. Of

course, most of us were totally unaware of this happening. That last verse was

the following:

Our fortune / Is your / Shaven face / It's our best / Advertising space./

Burma-Shave

That final message proved ironic since by the early 1960s, roadside billboards

had become environmentally incorrect. Perhaps more to the point, they were not

considered the best means of advertising a product -- radio, television and

newspapers having come into play. Electric razors and superhighways together

had spelled doom for the product and its signs.

Inevitably, the Burma-Vita Company sold out to -- and I hate to have to write

this -- a certain fast-growing tobacco company that was eager to interrupt our

landscape with its own message: Not R.J. Reynolds but Phillip Morris, Inc.

Joe Camel or the Marlboro Man, we could pick our poison and roadside

billboards would never be the same again. What a Burma-bummer!

(Dorothy Evans, a former reporter for The Newtown Bee, is moving to the

Washington, D.C., area later this month.)