What Happened to those Old Burma-Shave Signs - Page 1 Continued

Burma-Shave was created by the O'Dell brothers who lived in Minneapolis and had a little plant in the Bryn Mar district. On Mondays they would drive along the highways near a town and place those signs. Then they would proceed to the next town and repeat the process. Late on Thursday and Friday they would backtrack and call upon the local drugstore(s) asking, "No doubt you have had calls for Burma-Shave." They would take orders and leave the merchandise along with reorder forms. That's how they got started in the 1930s, and they did it for years. Finally in the 1960s, Phillip Morris became interested in this little Burma-Shave company. The company sales were about $900.000 a year when the company was sold to Philip Morris. Phillip Morris then proceeded to buy a series of 1-minute TV commercials on NFL football games, which cost something like $150,000 each. This decision actually destroyed a good little profit-making company in one football season. You might say it went up like smoke.