By G. Michael Dobbs
news@thereminder.com

A happy chance finding of a long sought-after book made me start thinking about marketing ploys from my past.

While on my most recent “old man tour” with my friends Stephen Bissette and Joseph Citro, I found a book in a junk shop in Bridgewater, VT., that as a kid I had seen advertised in Yankee Magazine.

The book is “Verse by the Side of the Road,” by Frank Rowsome, Jr., and it tells the story of the Burma Shave signs.

In 1962, my dad was stationed at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, AL. Alabama is his home state and there were many weekends that we made the trip from Montgomery to the northeast corner of the state where he grew up.

He lived in a hamlet called Portersville, between Fort Payne and Collinsville on U.S. Route 11. Along that route were Burma-Shave signs and they intrigued the heck out of me.

Now, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, allow me to explain. The company that manufactured Burma Shave, a shave cream with a difference, decided in 1926 to market their brush-less cream with humorous rhymes on signs placed in sequence on America’s growing highway system.

They did this until 1963.

So, as you drove down a highway you’d see a series of red wooden signs, each of which carried one line of poem.

Here are some examples:

• Don’t lose/ Your head/ To gain a minute/ You need your head/ Your brains are in it/ Burma-Shave.

• If a gift/You must choose/ Give him one/ He’ll like/ To use/ Burma-Shave.

• When the stork/ Delivers a boy/ Our whole / Darn factory/ Jumps for joy/ Burma-Shave.

• No matter / How you slice it / It's still your face / Be humane / Use / Burma-Shave

• Our Fortune/Is your/ Shaven face/ It’s our Best/ Advertising space/ Burma-Shave.

• Every shaver / Now can snore / Six more minutes / Than before / By using / Burma-Shave

• Your shaving brush / Has had its day / So why not / Shave the modern way / With / Burma-Shave

Now Burma-Shave advertised in other conventional ways, but perhaps one could call this approach the first viral advertising campaign, as the signs popped up in places one didn’t expect advertising.

Now Burma-Shave’s distinction was it could be used out of the tube and didn’t require a shaving cup and brush to make the lather needed for a close shave. The irony is today, the company that bought the brand only markets a shaving soap and brush combo – exactly the kind of shaving technology Burma-Shave wanted to replace.

Burma-Shave is still remembered. There are plenty of nostalgic products on the Internet involving the poems and the Burma-Shave logo. A set of original signs is now up for sale on eBay for a mere $1,250.

They would look lovely set up in my office, by the way – just saying.

The book I found has actually been reprinted and is in a new edition. You may want to pick it up yourself and you won’t have rummage through used books stores to find it.

The Burma-Shave memories spurred another one from the early 1960s. We were living in Sixteen Acres in Springfield and I recall very well a sound truck driving slowly through our neighborhood blaring out the theme song to Mr. Clean.

At the time Mr. Clean was a new product and someone must have decided that creating an earworm was a great way to influence people to buy the new floor cleanser.

If that were to happen today, I would want to throw bricks at the truck. My neighborhood is noisy enough.

G. Michael Dobbs is the managing editor of Reminder Publications and Prime’s local columnist.