A. Odell; Billboard Bard of Burma Shave

“ Shaving brushes You’ll see ‘em On the shelf In some museum Burma Shave “

Allan G. Odell, who convinced his father to invest a few dollars in a billboard in a farmer’s field in 1925, eventually providing glimpses of mirth for an America between wars and immersed in a Depression, is dead.

Odell, who developed the roadside rhymes for Burma Shave cream, was 90 when he died Monday in Edina, Minn., not far from where the first signs were posted.

The standard Burma Shave couplet was written on four sequential billboards. A fifth sign always read, Burma Shave. At one time, there were 7,000 sets of signs in 45 states. One set (above) was presented to the Smithsonian Institution in the 1960s.

Odell first penned the standard Burma Shave couplets with his late brother Leonard.

The outdoor signs were born shortly after the Odells’ father, Clinton, worked with a chemist to develop a brushless shaving cream. It was called Burma Shave.

Initial sales proved slow until Odell saw a gas station sign that told travelers there were “Gas, Oil, Restrooms Ahead.”

With $200 from his father and some old boards, he erected a dozen sets of signs, the first of them in a nearby field; the rest on two highways near Minneapolis.

“Within this vale Of toil and sin Your head grows bald But not your chin Burma Shave

His idea was, he said, “to make friends with people.” It worked and orders for Burma Shave began arriving within weeks.

“Does your husband misbehave Grunt and grumble Rant and rave Shoot the brute some Burma Shave”

At first the Odell brothers wrote all the jingles, but as the signboards increased, they hired contributors from across the country. Not all of those submitted, however, could be used in those virtuous times:

“My man won’t shave Said Hazel Huz But I should worry Dora’s does.”

But radio and then television commercials began to eat away at the effectiveness of the always good-humored slogans and they were discontinued in 1964.

Both brothers by then were top executives with the $1-million-a-year company and retired when it was sold to Philip Morris Inc. in 1963.

Leonard Odell died in 1991.