Back Seat Combat: Road Trips in the 1950s

It’s official!

With Memorial Day behind us, America is on the move as summer vacations get underway and folks take to the interstates.

In my childhood in the 1950s, in the pre-interstate highway age, road trips were long and quite boring, especially when you’re a kid.

Our car for the annual Jersey-to-Florida trek each July was a 1954 two-tone Ford station wagon that had three things missing: a radio, clock and air conditioning.

My father firmly believed there were two automotive items that Detroit was industrially incapable of producing: radios and clocks.

He opined that you could count on them being broken well-before the car’s warranty expired.

And, well, as far as air conditioning, roll down a window and be beaten to death by 50 mph winds, because air conditioning was only for the wealthy, he stated with authority while we refugees melted in the backseat.

So, when on an extended trip, he fashioned a clock which was a 1920s-era pocket watch which he affixed to the dashboard with a thin strand of wire and kept up a steady drumbeat all the way from Jersey to Florida and back.

Our radio was the two transistors that my brother and I bought along which continually needed to be tuned as stations came and went as they faded into oblivion as we rolled down the highway.

And as boredom sank in, backseat combat broke out, which called for peace treaties and promises barked from the front seat by our parents.

“He’s on my side,” I’d complain.

“Fred touched me,” my brother Lloyd would echo.

 “Look out the window,” my father barked, while my mother said, “Put that book down, Frederick, it’ll make you carsick.”

So between a radio that faded in and out, resisting touching campaigns or annexing seat territory that wasn’t yours, to pass the time we read billboards.

Until 1964, when the Highway Beautification Bill was championed by Lady Bird Johnson and billboards largely vanished.

Up until then, roadside billboards hinted at a million temptations like Ross Allen’s Reptile Institute, a Florida snake farm, weird local museums offering two-headed stuffed chickens and other creepy oddities, amusement parks, and other things only kids wanted to see and parents didn’t.

Billboards, that were a great advertising medium for restaurants, cafes, hotels and motels appeared as one approached sizable towns and cities, such as South of the Border, the tacky South Carolina motel on US 301 — it’s still there — with a Mexican theme whose spokesperson for several hundred miles was Pedro.

If you drove by, the last sign was Pedro intoning, “Back up, Amigo! You missed it!”

Among the signs, the captive cherished reading, were those red and white  advertising Burma-Shave, a brushless shaving cream that had been invented by the Odell family in Minneapolis in the early 1920s.

“You didn’t have to pack that wet brush in your grip where it would mildew and get foul-smelling before you got home,” Leonard Odell, who with his brother Allan created the roadside advertising campaign, explained in an interview.

SHAVING BRUSHES/YOU’LL SOON SEE ‘EM/WAY DOWN EAST/IN SOME MUSEUM.

The 36-inch signs were set up in a series every 100 feet or so, allowing passengers in a car travelling at 35 mph to read the message in 18 seconds.

The roadside doggerel always ended with a single sign proclaiming Burma-Shave.

By the 1950s, the signs totaled 7,000 and spanned 45 states, and landowners were paid for use of their land.

This was the Golden Age of Advertising when Americans were transfixed by products pushing hygiene such as Listerine to cure bad breath, Lifebuoy soap to expunge body odor and Feenamint to banish irregularity, and Burma Shave happily joined in.

HE PLAYED/A SAX/HAD NO B.O./BUT HIS WHISKERS SCRATCHED//SO SHE LET HIM GO.

Or: HIS FACE WAS SMOOTH/COOL AS ICE/AND OH LOUISE/HE SMELLED SO NICE. Or: HIS CHEEK/WAS ROUGH/HIS CHICK VAMOOSED/ AND NOW SHE WON’T/COME HOME TO ROOST. 

Alexander Woolcott, the author and wit, observed that reading one Burma-Shave sign was as difficult as eating one salted peanut. 

THE BEARDED LADY TRIED A JAR/SHE’S NOW/A FAMOUS MOVIE STAR. Or: SAID JULIET/ TO ROMEO/ IF YOU/ WON’T SHAVE /GO HOMEO.

As the Odell brothers’ creative well ran dry, they paid $100 for winning entries that often reached 50,0000 submissions.

THIS CREAM/MAKES THE GARDENER’S DAUGHTER/PLANT HER TU-LIPS/ WHERE SHE OUGHTER.

Those puns, jingles and roadside wisdom kept the nation roaring through the dark years of the Great Depression.

They also injected roadside safety into their messages for motorists to lay off the gas and not drink and drive.

THE MIDNIGHT RIDE/OF PAUL/FOR BEER/LED TO A/WARMER HEMPISPHERE. Or: PAST/SCHOOL HOUSES/TAKE IT SLOW/LET THE LITTLE/SHAVERS GROW. Or: ALTHO INSURED/REMEMBER, KIDDO/THEY DON’T PAY YOU/THEY PAY/YOUR WIDOW.

Or: A CURVE/AT 69 PER/WE HATE TO LOSE/A CUSTOMER. Or: SLOW DOWN, PA/SAKES ALIVE/MA MISSED SIGNS/FOUR/AND FIVE.

As the signs’ popularity ricocheted and offered a few moments of relief from highway boredom and a laugh, in 1947 this sign was posted; ALTHO/WE’VE SOLD/SIX MILLION OTHERS/WE STILL CAN’T SELL/THOSE COUGHDROP BROTHERS.

In 1963, the Burma Vita Co. manufacturers of Burma-Shave, was sold to Philip Morris’ operating subsidiary, American Safety Razor Products, and the new owners made the decision to kill the Burma-Shave roadside advertising campaign, in favor of radio and TV advertising.

By 1966, the signs had been removed and were now only a memory, but important enough, that several survivors reside and are on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan, whose sign reads: WITHIN THIS VALE/OF TOIL/AND SIN/YOUR HEAD GROWS BALD/BUT NOT YOUR CHIN.

On the demise of Burma-Shave signs, William K. Zinsser, author and professor of writing at Yale University, lamented in the Saturday Evening Post, that Americans missed “not for something going out of the landscape but for something that is going out of ourselves. We sigh for a time when the road was full of surprises [and] for a time when a young man could capture the nation by painting droll signs on second hand boards, though all slick advice told him he was crazy.”