Burma-Shave Roadside Signs

1925

Date: 1925-1963 · Place: United States (originating Minneapolis, Minnesota) · Figures: Allan Odell, copywriter and inventor of the format · Clinton Odell, Burma-Vita Company founder · Leonette Odell, contest judge · Tags: Advertising, Roadside, SerialFormat 01. The Distributed Punchline In 1925 Allan Odell convinces his father Clinton, owner of the Minneapolis-based Burma-Vita Company, to spend two hundred dollars on small red and white wooden signs planted in sequence along Highway 65 toward Albert Lea. Five signs at a hundred-foot spacing, each carrying one fragment of a single message, plus a sixth reading Burma-Shave. The form is the meme. The driver decodes the joke across roughly eighteen seconds of road time, supplies the rhythm in their own head, and shares the punchline at the next stop. By 1935 there are seven thousand sign sets across forty-five states. 02. Public Authorship From 1928 onward Burma-Vita runs an annual jingle contest, paying one hundred dollars for accepted verses. Tens of thousands of submissions a year arrive at the Minneapolis office; Leonette Odell sorts them. The audience writes the meme it then reads from a car window. Within this vale / Of toil / And sin / Your head grows bald / But not your chin / Burma-Shave is a 1933 submission, not a copywriter's line. "Past schoolhouses / Take it slow / Let the little / Shavers grow / Burma-Shave" — Burma-Shave roadside sequence, 1960, the company's penultimate year of signage 03. End of the Form The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 raises typical cruising speeds and pushes traffic onto limited-access roads with no shoulder for a six-sign sequence. Philip Morris buys Burma-Vita in 1963 and pulls the signs that same year. The format outlives the product as a template: every subsequent roadside teaser campaign, every multi-panel internet image macro that withholds its punchline across a scroll, descends from a Highway 65 sequence eighteen seconds long. Sources • Frank Rowsome Jr., 'The Verse by the Side of the Road: The Story of the Burma-Shave Signs and Jingles' (Stephen Greene Press, 1965) • Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Archives Center, Burma-Shave Collection • Bill Vossler, 'Burma-Shave: The Rhymes, the Signs, the Times' (North Star Press, 1997)