Deal’s a Deal

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BurmaShaveSigns_Route66.jpg

Between 1925 and 1963, Burma-Shave billboards were ubiquitous on American highways. Over the course of 18 seconds a motorist would pass six successive red and white signs that formed a rhymed verse:

SAID JULIET
TO ROMEO
IF YOU
WON’T SHAVE
GO HOMEO
BURMA-SHAVE

THE WOLF
IS SHAVED
SO NEAT AND TRIM
RED RIDING HOOD
IS CHASING HIM
BURMA-SHAVE

At its peak the campaign had 40,000 signs posted between Maine and Texas. The jingles were clearly whimsical, but anything that popular invites some smart-alecks:

FREE OFFER! FREE OFFER!!
RIP A FENDER
OFF YOUR CAR
MAIL IT IN FOR
A HALF-POUND JAR
BURMA-SHAVE

When this poem was posted, “scores of fenders of notable decrepitude arrived at the plant by parcel post and express,” noted Frank Rowsome Jr. in his 1965 history of the campaign, The Verse by the Side of the Road. “Many enterprising people scavenged Minnesota junkyards, triumphantly bearing off rusty horrors that they lugged to the Burma-Shave offices.” Each was gamely honored with a free jar of shaving cream, but this only made things worse:

FREE — FREE
A TRIP
TO MARS
FOR 900
EMPTY JARS
BURMA-SHAVE

At this Arliss “Frenchy” French, manager of a Red Owl supermarket in Appleton, Wis., produced 900 empty containers and demanded to be sent to Mars. Burma-Shave sent general manager Ralph Getchman to Appleton, where he found that French had heaped the jars in a huge pile in his store and taken out a full-page newspaper ad reading SEND FRENCHY TO MARS! After some bewildered havering, the company struck a deal with Red Owl’s publicist — they sent French and his wife to Moers, Germany. “The Frenches had a marvelous time,” remembered Burma-Shave president Leonard Odell. “We still get Christmas cards from them.”

| Oddities

Seasons, Greetings

Oliver Herford opened his Christmas cards in July.

“When other people’s friends have gone away for the summer and neglect them,” he said, “it certainly is gratifying and exciting to be cheerily greeted by everyone you know.”

| Literature

The Sumter County Does

sumter county does

In the early morning of Aug. 9, 1976, the bodies of a young man and woman were found on a secluded dirt road in Sumter County, S.C. Each had been shot in the throat, chest, and back. Both were white and in their mid-20s. They bore no identification, but there were signs that they were wealthy: He wore an expensive Bulova watch and had had specialized dental work, and she wore a jade ring.

“They were clean, neat,” remembered county coroner Verna Moore. “She was beautiful, real pretty girl. He was also.”

Police circulated composite drawings across the country and asked anyone with information to come forward. The case was publicized on numerous national news programs, and police consulted Interpol, immigration authorities, and U.S. Customs investigators. In 30 years, thousands of tips have been offered, but every lead has fallen through. No one has ever explained who the pair were, how they came there, who might have killed them, or why.

“I have not given up on this case,” Moore said in 2001. “The reason I am haunted is, I cannot understand how two young people disappeared from somewhere and that their parents would not be looking for them. … I can’t count the times when somebody hasn’t asked, ‘Have you ever found out who those children are?'”

12/24/2023 UPDATE: In 2021, with the help of DNA evidence, the pair were identified as Pamela Buckley and James Freund. Their murders remain unsolved. (Thanks, Ron.)

| Crime

In a Word

sphalm
n. an erroneous doctrine or tenet

“The phrases men are accustomed to repeat incessantly, end by becoming convictions and ossify the organs of intelligence.” — Goethe

“What fresh views would we acquire if we could for once eliminate from our capital of truisms all that is not intrinsic but has accrued through frequent repetition?” — G.C. Lichtenberg

“We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.” — Buckminster Fuller

“Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they might come to be stamped as ‘necessities of thought,’ ‘a priori givens,’ etc. The path of scientific progress is often made impassable for a long time by such errors.” — Albert Einstein

“It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.” — Alfred North Whitehead

| Language

About Face

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To commemorate the defeat of the Spanish Armada, England struck a medal bearing the device of a fleet flying under full sail.

The inscription read Venit, vidit, fugit — “It came, it saw, it fled.”

| History

Planting One’s Feet

https://www.google.com/patents/US15106

George Meacham invented this convenient planting device in 1856. Strap a seed bag to your waist and a plunger to each boot and you can plant corn effortlessly while strolling in your fields.

And maybe afterward you can dispense popcorn at the campfire.

| Technology

Constitution

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A lump of clay exists on Monday. On Tuesday it’s fashioned into a statue. Are the lump and the statue the same thing? It would appear not: The statue didn’t exist on Monday, and it wouldn’t survive being squashed, but the lump did and would. But if the lump and the statue are two different material objects, how can they coincide? How can two things exist in the same place at the same time?

| Oddities

Fore-Edge Paintings

Some of your old books may contain hidden artworks: Beginning in the 17th century, a book’s binder would sometimes paint a watercolor scene on the edge of the book’s page stack. If the pages were then gilded, the image might remain hidden for years until the pages were fanned.

Sometimes two different images are hidden in the same book, revealed successively when the pages are fanned “up” and “down.” In rare cases paintings are hidden not just on the book’s fore edge but on the top and bottom as well, offering a panoramic view of the painting’s subject.

| Art

Ghosts of Scotland

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sturnus_vulgaris_m.jpg

One last striking story about bird mimicry:

I was in the Outer Hebrides and I came across an abandoned derelict croft. It had no roof, but very substantial walls and in the gaps between the stonework was a starlings’ nest. I could hear the birds inside, and eventually one of the starlings came to defend its territory. I heard straight away that it wasn’t just the usual rambling song. It started to mimic a Corncrake, a species that is very rare in mainland Britain. It did this bird’s buzzing repetitive song, but then it immediately went into other sounds that seemed familiar and had a strong rhythm to them. As I was listening I was looking around and could see the remnants of farm machinery, including an ancient tractor that had not moved for 20-30 years. I realised this bird was singing the song of some of this machinery. It was singing the song of a mechanical pump that had obviously been active around this farm, and used by the people who had lived here.

I wasn’t listening to the same starling that heard these original sounds. These copied sounds are usually passed on from parents or neighbouring birds so that a young bird absorbs and then duplicates them. The strange thing was that I was recording the sounds in what had been somebody’s living room, a place that had obviously been full of the conversations of family life over generations and which had passed into history. Yet the birds had returned and taken it back — claimed this space and these rocks — and were singing their own song. And they were singing the songs that were around when the people were here.

— Chris Watson of Tyne and Wear, U.K., quoted in Mark Cocker’s Birds & People, 2013

| Oddities