Remembering Burma Shave Signs: The Best Advertising Campaign Ever.
When you grow up in Connecticut, you are heartily sick of winter by the time Spring Vacation finally rolls around. Back in the late 40s or very early 50s, that was when a visit to my grandparents in Fort Myers, Florida, sounded awfully good. We took the train a few times, but at least twice we did it by car.
In those days, a trip like that was an ordeal. There were no interstate highways and whatever route you chose, it necessarily took you right through the heart of every city and town along the way. It was about 1400 miles altogether and almost all of it was on ordinary two-lane roads. On one of those memorable journeys, my brother, Pete, probably 6 or 7 at the time, became carsick just south of New Haven. We had covered 40 miles since leaving home.
Keeping three kids occupied on a trip like that and under those conditions was a challenge. There were word games and “spotting” games … as in “Let’s see who will be the first to spot a white horse!” Before long, my father would issue another challenge: “Let’s see who can go the longest time without saying anything!”
If anything saved those interminable car trips, it was the Burma Shave signs … five small signs spaced out at the side of the road, one every hundred feet or so. The first four signs –- white lettering on a red background — would deliver a clever rhyming message, always with a safe-driving theme.
The last one would say, simply …
We’d come up on another set of these signs every hour of so and one of us would read them aloud as we drove past. This has to be one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history. Here are just two examples of the kind of messages that appeared on those signs back in those days (there were literally hundreds):
DON’T LOSE YOUR HEAD
TO GAIN A MINUTE
YOU NEED YOUR HEAD
YOUR BRAINS ARE IN IT
Burma Shave
PASSING SCHOOL ZONE
TAKE IT SLOW
LET OUR LITTLE
SHAVERS GROW.
Burma Shave
Funny, isn’t it. The Burma Shave signs are what I remember most about those long trips down to Fort Myers. That and, “Let’s see who can spot the first palm tree!”
