Burma-Shave: Part of rural Americana

Red and white Burma-Shave signs were once a familiar sight for motorists driving along the nostalgic back roads of rural America. 

Those were the days before the zoom-along Interstate highway system. Burma-Shave ruled between the years of 1925 and 1963…as a leader in the men’s shaving cream market. 

Mary Laine of the Minnesota Historical Society said the Burma-Shave story began with Robert Odell, a Minneapolis attorney, who saw a business opportunity to manufacture and sell a special liniment in the early 1900s. 

His ointment smelled nasty, but it was a wonderfully effective treatment for burns. Robert Odell christened the substance as “Burma-Vita.” Most of its essential oils came from the Malay peninsula and Burma in southeast Asia. “Vita” is the Latin word for “life and vigor.” 

It didn’t sell. Robert’s son, Clinton Odell, suggested that the company needed a product that “people would use daily…something like Lloyd’s Euxesis.” (It was a brushless shaving cream that had been invented by Solomon Morgan Lloyd in London, England.)

In 1925, the Odells brought in local chemist Carl Noren to “improve” Lloyd’s shaving cream product, which was unpleasantly “gummy and sticky.” 

Noren tried 300 different combinations, before stumbling on “formula 143,” which had been sitting on the shelf for three months. Aging of the cream was the key to “get a fine shave,” Laine said. 

Bingo. The Odells rolled out “Burma-Shave.” A half-pound jar cost 50 cents, and a big tube was 35 cents. 

By now, Clinton Odell’s sons, Allan and Leonard, were also on the payroll. Allan was older, so he was put in charge of marketing. 

He came up with the concept of a “series of sequential signboards” to market its product. 

Larry Crane, a classic cars historian, said that by the fall of 1925, Burma-Shave signs went into production – “no rhymes or jingles, only simple prose.” 

The Odells added a wood shop to their factory to manufacture the simple signs from scrap lumber.

That first sign read: Shave the modern way / fine for the skin / druggists have it / Burma-Shave. 

“The Odells made 10 sets,” Crane said. “They got permission from farmers for strips of land along two roads out of Minneapolis. Allan Odell remembered digging postholes 3-feet deep to securely set the signs.”

“By the start of 1926, repeat product orders for Burma-Shave were coming in from druggists serving people who drove those roads connecting Minneapolis to the Minnesota communities of Albert Lea and Red Wing,” Crane said. 

The company standardized on red horizontal signs with white letters, and the messages ended with the Burma-Shave logo. Most of the messages required five or six signs.

“Posts were planted 100 paces apart,” Crane said. “At 35 miles per hour, it took about 3 seconds from sign to sign.” In those 18 seconds or so, “you could be moved to chuckle and recall the rhyme when you got home. 

His face was smooth / and cool as ice / and oh Louise? / he smelled so nice / Burma-Shave. 

Every shaver / now can snore / six minutes more / than before / by using / Burma-Shave. 

Don’t take / a curve / at 60 per / we hate to lose / a customer / Burma-Shave. 

Alexander Woolcott of The New Yorker magazine observed: “It was as difficult to read one Burma-Shave sign as it was to eat one salted peanut!”