Jan 29, 2024 4 min read

My maternal grandparents lived in Kalamazoo when I was a kid, and in the ’50s we took several summer road trips to visit them. It was a pretty boring drive along the Pennsylvania and Ohio turnpikes for me: video games hadn’t been invented, so just about the only distractions were coloring books and playing “Riddle-Dee-Dee” with my mom. (“Riddle-Dee-Dee, Riddle-Dee-Dee, I see something you don’t see.” Still pretty boring: Most often the mysterious object was a horse or a cow.) But the roadside signs advertising Burma-Shave always made me laugh.

Those too young to remember Burma-Shave, which debuted in 1925 as one of the first brushless shaving creams, likely won’t remember the signs, either. They debuted in 1926 as a great advertising gimmick created by Allan O’Dell, the son of the company’s founder. With travel by car becoming popular, O’Dell saw an opportunity to boost sales by erecting signs along the country’s developing highways. But O’Dell didn’t opt for large, traditional signs or billboards. Instead, he decided to use small signs using humorous rhymes that would make people laugh and remember the product.

O’Dell had the signs set up close to the right-hand shoulder of the roads in groups of six, spaced 100 feet apart so that motorists driving 35 mph — considered a safe speed on the country’s mostly two-lane roads — would have time to read them. More than 7,000 signs eventually were erected in 45 states. Here’s one example: “Within this vale / Of toil / And sin / Your head grows bald / But not your chin / Burma-Shave.” And another: “The Wolf is shaved / So neat and trim / Red Riding Hood / Is chasing him / Burma-Shave.”

Drivers soon began to request Burma-Shave at local drugstores. The company started to receive orders from all over America, and the O’Dells prospered for decades. But as highway speed limits increased, drivers no longer had time to read the clever jingles. Burma-Shave sales declined, and Gillette Foamy and other shaving creams also siphoned off buyers. But the final blow for Burma-Shave came in 1963, when the O’Dells sold the company to the American Safety Razor Co., which pulled down the signs because they seemed too quaint for Space Age America. The last signs disappeared in 1965, ending a piece of Americana.

Today, although probably no one would consider them “quaint” or examples of Americana, another form of humorous highway sign is in danger of disappearing. On Jan. 19, the Federal Highway Administration (FHA) issued a statement in which it strongly suggested that overhead electronic signs should eliminate or keep to a minimum humorous sayings. Why? Because such messages could distract drivers by using obscure references that might take “greater time to process.” And, the agency suggested, signs should “command attention and respect.” I don’t know about you, but I can’t have much respect for a sign that tells me it will take 30 minutes to traverse the 4 miles between me and the Fort Pitt Tunnels.

Some contemporary humorous overhead signs I found online might be more in the Burma-Shave vein:

“Visiting in-laws? Slow down. Get there late.”

“Don’t be a stinker. Use your blinker.”

“Four I’s in Mississippi. Two eyes on the road.” Am I alone in thinking that this message is rather conflicted?

And none of these messages even remotely approaches the punsmanship displayed by whoever wrote this ditty for Burma-Shave in 1959:

“If daisies are your / Favorite flower / Keep pushin’ up / Those miles-per-hour / Burma-Shave.”

There’s a contemporary political party whose members keep yapping about reining in “government overreach.” Maybe they should start by saying, “Whoa!” to the FHA.

And I have just the words:

“From Congress there / Arises clatter / But never on / The things / That matter.”