Books by Rowsome, Frank, Jr.
- Rowsome, Frank, Jr.
The Verse by the Side of the Road.
New York: Plume, [1965] 1979.
ISBN 0-452-26762-5.
-
In the years before the Interstate Highway System, long
trips on the mostly two-lane roads in the United States could
bore the kids in the back seat near unto death, and drive their
parents to the brink of homicide by the incessant drone of
“Are we there yet?” which began less than half an
hour out of the driveway. A blessed respite from counting
cows, license plate poker, and counting down the dwindling
number of bottles of beer on the wall would be the appearance
on the horizon of a series of six red and white signs, which
all those in the car would strain their eyes to be the first to
read.
In the fall of 1925, the owners of the virtually unknown
Burma-Vita company of Minneapolis came up with a new idea to
promote the brushless shaving cream they had invented. Since
the product would have particular appeal to travellers who
didn't want to pack a wet and messy shaving brush and mug in
their valise, what better way to pitch it than with signs along
the highways frequented by those potential customers? Thus was
born, at first only on a few highways in Minnesota, what was
to become an American institution for decades and a fondly remembered
piece of Americana, the Burma-Shave signs. As the signs
proliferated across the landscape, so did sales; so rapid
was the growth of the company in the 1930s that a director
of sales said (p. 38), “We never knew that there
was a depression.” At the peak the company had more
than six million regular customers, who were regularly reminded
to purchase the product by almost 7000 sets of signs—around
40,000 individual signs, all across the country.
While the first signs were straightforward selling copy,
Burma-Shave signs quickly evolved into the characteristic
jingles, usually rhyming and full of corny humour and
outrageous puns. Rather than hiring an advertising agency,
the company ran national contests which paid $100 for the
best jingle and regularly received more than 50,000 entries
from amateur versifiers.
Almost from the start, the company devoted a substantial
number of the messages to highway safety; this was not the
result of outside pressure from anti-billboard forces as
I remember hearing in the 1950s, but based on a belief that
it was the right thing to do—and besides, the sixth
sign always mentioned the product! The set of signs above
is the jingle that most sticks in my memory: it was a favourite
of the Burma-Shave founders as well, having been re-run several times
since its first appearance in 1933 and chosen by them to be
immortalised in the Smithsonian Institution. Another that
comes immediately to my mind is the following, from 1960, on
the highway safety theme:
Times change, and with the advent of roaring four-lane freeways, billboard
bans or set-back requirements which made sequences of signs
unaffordable, the increasing urbanisation of American society,
and of course the dominance of television over all other
advertising media, by the early 1960s it was clear to the
management of Burma-Vita that the road sign campaign was no
longer effective. They had already decided to phase it out before
they sold the company to Philip Morris in 1963, after which
the signs were quickly taken down, depriving the two-lane rural
byways of America of some uniquely American wit and wisdom, but
who ever drove them any more, since the Interstate went through?
The first half of this delightful book tells the story of the
origin, heyday, and demise of the Burma-Shave signs, and the
balance lists all of the six hundred jingles preserved in the records
of the Burma-Vita Company, by year of introduction. This isn't
something you'll probably want to read straight through, but it's
great to pick up from time to time when you want a chuckle.
And then the last sign had been read: all the family exclaimed in
unison, “Burma-Shave!”. It had been maybe sixty miles since the
last set of signs, and so they'd recall that one and remember other
great jingles from earlier trips. Then things would quiet down
for a while. “Are we there yet?”
October 2006 
