Sometimes an ad campaign can become more famous than the product that it sells. Case in point, the Burma Shave road signs of the 1950s. Many of the red signs had one sentence written on each sign, so it was kind of a game to read on road trips. One of the best ones reads, "These signs we gladly dedicate To the men who've had no date of late - Burma Shave.
Way back in 1925 young Allan Odell pitched this great sales idea to his father, Clifford. Use small, wooden roadside signs to pitch their product, Burma-Shave, a brushless shaving cream. Dad wasn't wild about the idea but eventually gave Allan $200 to give it a try. Didn't take long for sales to soar. Soon Allan and his brother Leonard were putting up signs all over the dang place.At first the signs were pure sales pitch but as the years passed they found their sense of humor extending to safety tips and pure fun. And some good old-fashioned down home wisdom. At their height of popularity there were 7,000 Burma-Shave signs stretching across America. The familiar white on red signs, grouped by four, fives and sixes, were as much a part of a family trip as irritating your kid brother in the back seat of the car. You'd read first one, then another, anticipating the punch line on number five and the familiar Burma-Shave on the sixth. The signs cheered us during the Depression and the dark days of World War II. But things began to change in the late Fifties. Cars got faster and superhighways got built to accommodate them. The fun little signs were being replaced by huge, unsightly billboards. By 1963 they were all gone. As befits such an important part of American culture, one set is preserved by the Smithsonian Institution. It reads: Shaving brushes You'll soon see 'em On a shelf In some museum Burma-Shave His cheek Was rough His chick vamoosed And now she won't Come home to roost Burma-ShaveThe place to pass On curves You know Is only at A beauty show Burma-ShaveOn curves ahead Remember, sonny That rabbit's foot Didn't save The bunny Burma-Shave Twinkle, twinkle One-eyed car We all wonder WHERE you are Burma-Shave A guy Who drives A car wide open Is not thinkin' He's just hopin' Burma-Shave A hippie dude An average Joe A skinhead clean And then, oh gosh, oh my There's MOE, that's MOE... Burma-shave that dude! A whiskery kiss For the one You adore May not make her mad But her face will be sore Burma-Shave His brush is gone So what'll we do Said Mike Robe I To Mike Robe II Burma-ShaveIf your peach Keeps out Of reach Better practice What we preach Burma-ShaveWhen Super-shaved Remember, pard You'll still get slapped But not so hard Burma-ShaveBurma-Shave Was such a boom They passed The bride And kissed the groomTo kiss A mug That's like a cactus Takes more nerve Than it does practice Burma-ShaveThe whale Put Jonah Down the hatch But coughed him up Because he scratched Burma-ShaveViolets are blue Roses are pink On graves Of those Who drive and drink Burma-ShaveCandidate says Campaign Confusing Babies kiss me Since I've been using Burma-ShaveMy job is Keeping faces clean And nobody knows De stubble I've seen Burma-ShaveDoesn't Kiss you Like she useter? Perhaps she's seen A smoother rooster! Burma-ShaveNo use Knowing How to pick 'em If your half-shaved Whiskers stick 'em Burma-Shaveit! Many popular products for children, like Silly Putty® and the frisbee®, owe their success to entrepreneurship as much as invention. The same is true of the hula hoop, "the granddaddy of American fads." Children around the world have always played with hoops, by rolling and throwing them or twirling them around the waist and limbs.For adults, hoop twirling has at times been recommended as a weight-loss measure (ancient Greece) and, ironically, denounced as a source of sprains, pains and even heart attacks (14th-century England). These hoops were once made of vines or other plants, wood, or metal.The conversion of the toy hoop into 20th-century Americana came thanks to Richard Knerr and Arthur "Spud" Melin, founders of the Wham-O Company.In 1957, an Australian visiting California told them offhand that in his home country, children twirled bamboo hoops around their waists in gym class. Knerr and Melin saw how popular such a toy would be; and soon they were winning rave reviews from schoolkids for the hollow plastic prototype they had created. The next year, the hula hoop, whose name came from the Hawaiian dance its users seemed to imitate, was marketed nationwide. Americans kids and adults alike were hooked: Wham-O sold 25 million hula hoops in two months.The hula hoop has many uses. This young dude combines his golf game with the hoop!Almost 100 million international orders followed. Wham-O could hardly patent an ancient item, but did reinvent, manufacture and market the hula hoop for the modern world---for example, by using Marlex, a lightweight but durable plastic then recently invented by Phillips Petroleum. By the end of 1958, after $45 million in profits, the craze was dying down. But Richard Knerr was ready with another bombshell: that year he had discovered the "Frisbee."Today, the hula hoop still has its young fans, though eclipsed by faster-paced pastimes like inline skating. Nevertheless, the hula hoop is an outstanding example of entrepreneurial insight and modern manufacturing combined for sensational success.It's 45, it's still silly, and it still sells! In a world where sleek, speeding rollerblades and high-tech video games compete for kids' attention, it may be surprising that a glob of goo known as Silly Putty keeps bouncing along, 45 years after it arrived on the scene. This pliable little plaything was a bit of marketing magic that catapulted Connecticut into the toy-making spotlight in August 1950, shortly after the "gupp," as he called it, was first sold by Peter Hodgson, an out-of-work copywriter from New Haven. It became a craze in the 1950s. Children wouldn't sit still until they got their hands on Silly Putty. Then they sat only long enough to press it against their favorite comics and peel away the impressions. As soon as a kid learned how high Silly Putty bounced, these pinkish, nut-sized balls were ricocheting all around their homes. In 1968 the astronauts on the Apollo 8 moon mission carried Silly Putty into space in a specially designed sterling-silver egg -- to alleviate boredom and help fasten down tools during weightlessness. Free-lance writer Jama Coomes wrote this year in the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal that she has owned the same Silly Putty for almost five years, and it "has saved me thousands of dollars in psychiatrist's fees." Coomes described the therapeutic values of Silly Putty while kneading it, bouncing it, rolling it, stretching it and lifting impressions of faces of newly engaged couples from newspaper pages; then distorting them to release her anger at a date who stood her up. The Columbus (Ohio) Zoo used it to make casts of the hands and feet of gorillas for educational purposes. Silly Putty can also be used to clean typewriter keys, plug leaks, remove lint from clothing and steady wobbly tables. The 6 million units produced last year are three times what was produced in 1987, says Binney & Smith Inc., the Crayola crayon people who have made Silly Putty for the past 18 years. A market survey in 1990 showed that 97 percent of American households recognize the name Silly Putty and that almost 70 percent of American households have purchased it at some time. In 1990, they added four fluorescent colors -- magenta, orange, green and yellow. In 1991, Glow in the Dark Silly Putty arrived. Most pieces, still packed in plastic eggs, are priced under $2. But Classic Silly Putty is still the best seller. The man who made it all possible was Hodgson. In 1949 he went to work in New Haven for an advertising agency, which folded in six months. Out of work and broke, this restless, energetic 37-year-old was searching for something to do when he met up with "gupp." Gupp also had no place to go. It had been discovered six years earlier by James Wright, an engineer in General Electric's New Haven laboratory. Seeking to develop a synthetic rubber, Wright combined boric acid and silicone oil and got bouncing putty. Already $12,000 in debt, Hodgson borrowed $147 to buy a batch of the stuff. He and some part-time workers from Yale University, balled the putty up in 1-ounce portions and tucked into plastic eggs (Easter was coming. The price was about $1 a piece. Hodgson got Doubleday bookstores to take his product. But Silly Putty sales didn't really roll until August when it was mentioned in The New Yorker magazine's "Talk of the Town" section Aug. 26.Hodgson's phone rang for four days, and he had a quarter-million orders. He moved his production operation into a converted barn on Totoket Road in North Branford. In the next 17 years, the company expanded into Canada and West Germany, and annual sales reached $5 million. Silly Putty made Hodgson a very wealthy man. He and his wife, Margaret, lived in Madison in a mansion, with a tennis court and swimming pool, on 88 partially wooded acres overlooking Long Island Sound. Their place came to be known as 'The Silly Putty Estate'. Hodgson died there at age 64 in 1976, leaving an estate of $140 million. And that ain't silly.
At first the signs were pure sales pitch but as the years passed they found their sense of humor extending to safety tips and pure fun. And some good old-fashioned down home wisdom. At their height of popularity there were 7,000 Burma-Shave signs stretching across America. The familiar white on red signs, grouped by four, fives and sixes, were as much a part of a family trip as irritating your kid brother in the back seat of the car. You'd read first one, then another, anticipating the punch line on number five and the familiar Burma-Shave on the sixth.
The signs cheered us during the Depression and the dark days of World War II. But things began to change in the late Fifties. Cars got faster and superhighways got built to accommodate them. The fun little signs were being replaced by huge, unsightly billboards. By 1963 they were all gone. As befits such an important part of American culture, one set is preserved by the Smithsonian Institution. It reads:
Shaving brushes You'll soon see 'em On a shelf In some museum Burma-Shave
His cheek Was rough His chick vamoosed And now she won't Come home to roost Burma-Shave
The place to pass On curves You know Is only at A beauty show Burma-Shave
On curves ahead Remember, sonny That rabbit's foot Didn't save The bunny Burma-Shave
Twinkle, twinkle One-eyed car We all wonder WHERE you are Burma-Shave
A guy Who drives A car wide open Is not thinkin' He's just hopin' Burma-Shave
A hippie dude An average Joe A skinhead clean And then, oh gosh, oh my There's MOE, that's MOE... Burma-shave that dude!
A whiskery kiss For the one You adore May not make her mad But her face will be sore Burma-Shave
His brush is gone So what'll we do Said Mike Robe I To Mike Robe II Burma-Shave
If your peach Keeps out Of reach Better practice What we preach Burma-Shave
When Super-shaved Remember, pard You'll still get slapped But not so hard Burma-Shave
Burma-Shave Was such a boom They passed The bride And kissed the groom
To kiss A mug That's like a cactus Takes more nerve Than it does practice Burma-Shave
The whale Put Jonah Down the hatch But coughed him up Because he scratched Burma-Shave
Violets are blue Roses are pink On graves Of those Who drive and drink Burma-Shave
Candidate says Campaign Confusing Babies kiss me Since I've been using Burma-Shave
My job is Keeping faces clean And nobody knows De stubble I've seen Burma-Shave
Doesn't Kiss you Like she useter? Perhaps she's seen A smoother rooster! Burma-Shave
No use Knowing How to pick 'em If your half-shaved Whiskers stick 'em Burma-Shaveit!
The same is true of the hula hoop, "the granddaddy of American fads." Children around the world have always played with hoops, by rolling and throwing them or twirling them around the waist and limbs.
For adults, hoop twirling has at times been recommended as a weight-loss measure (ancient Greece) and, ironically, denounced as a source of sprains, pains and even heart attacks (14th-century England). These hoops were once made of vines or other plants, wood, or metal.The conversion of the toy hoop into 20th-century Americana came thanks to Richard Knerr and Arthur "Spud" Melin, founders of the Wham-O Company.
In 1957, an Australian visiting California told them offhand that in his home country, children twirled bamboo hoops around their waists in gym class. Knerr and Melin saw how popular such a toy would be; and soon they were winning rave reviews from schoolkids for the hollow plastic prototype they had created. The next year, the hula hoop, whose name came from the Hawaiian dance its users seemed to imitate, was marketed nationwide. Americans kids and adults alike were hooked: Wham-O sold 25 million hula hoops in two months.
The hula hoop has many uses. This young dude combines his golf game with the hoop!
Almost 100 million international orders followed. Wham-O could hardly patent an ancient item, but did reinvent, manufacture and market the hula hoop for the modern world---for example, by using Marlex, a lightweight but durable plastic then recently invented by Phillips Petroleum. By the end of 1958, after $45 million in profits, the craze was dying down. But Richard Knerr was ready with another bombshell: that year he had discovered the "Frisbee."Today, the hula hoop still has its young fans, though eclipsed by faster-paced pastimes like inline skating. Nevertheless, the hula hoop is an outstanding example of entrepreneurial insight and modern manufacturing combined for sensational success.
It's 45, it's still silly, and it still sells! In a world where sleek, speeding rollerblades and high-tech video games compete for kids' attention, it may be surprising that a glob of goo known as Silly Putty keeps bouncing along, 45 years after it arrived on the scene. This pliable little plaything was a bit of marketing magic that catapulted Connecticut into the toy-making spotlight in August 1950, shortly after the "gupp," as he called it, was first sold by Peter Hodgson, an out-of-work copywriter from New Haven. It became a craze in the 1950s. Children wouldn't sit still until they got their hands on Silly Putty. Then they sat only long enough to press it against their favorite comics and peel away the impressions. As soon as a kid learned how high Silly Putty bounced, these pinkish, nut-sized balls were ricocheting all around their homes. In 1968 the astronauts on the Apollo 8 moon mission carried Silly Putty into space in a specially designed sterling-silver egg -- to alleviate boredom and help fasten down tools during weightlessness. Free-lance writer Jama Coomes wrote this year in the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal that she has owned the same Silly Putty for almost five years, and it "has saved me thousands of dollars in psychiatrist's fees." Coomes described the therapeutic values of Silly Putty while kneading it, bouncing it, rolling it, stretching it and lifting impressions of faces of newly engaged couples from newspaper pages; then distorting them to release her anger at a date who stood her up. The Columbus (Ohio) Zoo used it to make casts of the hands and feet of gorillas for educational purposes. Silly Putty can also be used to clean typewriter keys, plug leaks, remove lint from clothing and steady wobbly tables. The 6 million units produced last year are three times what was produced in 1987, says Binney & Smith Inc., the Crayola crayon people who have made Silly Putty for the past 18 years. A market survey in 1990 showed that 97 percent of American households recognize the name Silly Putty and that almost 70 percent of American households have purchased it at some time. In 1990, they added four fluorescent colors -- magenta, orange, green and yellow. In 1991, Glow in the Dark Silly Putty arrived. Most pieces, still packed in plastic eggs, are priced under $2. But Classic Silly Putty is still the best seller. The man who made it all possible was Hodgson. In 1949 he went to work in New Haven for an advertising agency, which folded in six months. Out of work and broke, this restless, energetic 37-year-old was searching for something to do when he met up with "gupp." Gupp also had no place to go. It had been discovered six years earlier by James Wright, an engineer in General Electric's New Haven laboratory. Seeking to develop a synthetic rubber, Wright combined boric acid and silicone oil and got bouncing putty. Already $12,000 in debt, Hodgson borrowed $147 to buy a batch of the stuff. He and some part-time workers from Yale University, balled the putty up in 1-ounce portions and tucked into plastic eggs (Easter was coming. The price was about $1 a piece. Hodgson got Doubleday bookstores to take his product. But Silly Putty sales didn't really roll until August when it was mentioned in The New Yorker magazine's "Talk of the Town" section Aug. 26.Hodgson's phone rang for four days, and he had a quarter-million orders. He moved his production operation into a converted barn on Totoket Road in North Branford. In the next 17 years, the company expanded into Canada and West Germany, and annual sales reached $5 million. Silly Putty made Hodgson a very wealthy man. He and his wife, Margaret, lived in Madison in a mansion, with a tennis court and swimming pool, on 88 partially wooded acres overlooking Long Island Sound. Their place came to be known as 'The Silly Putty Estate'. Hodgson died there at age 64 in 1976, leaving an estate of $140 million. And that ain't silly.
It's 45, it's still silly, and it still sells! In a world where sleek, speeding rollerblades and high-tech video games compete for kids' attention, it may be surprising that a glob of goo known as Silly Putty keeps bouncing along, 45 years after it arrived on the scene. This pliable little plaything was a bit of marketing magic that catapulted Connecticut into the toy-making spotlight in August 1950, shortly after the "gupp," as he called it, was first sold by Peter Hodgson, an out-of-work copywriter from New Haven.
It became a craze in the 1950s. Children wouldn't sit still until they got their hands on Silly Putty. Then they sat only long enough to press it against their favorite comics and peel away the impressions. As soon as a kid learned how high Silly Putty bounced, these pinkish, nut-sized balls were ricocheting all around their homes.
In 1968 the astronauts on the Apollo 8 moon mission carried Silly Putty into space in a specially designed sterling-silver egg -- to alleviate boredom and help fasten down tools during weightlessness. Free-lance writer Jama Coomes wrote this year in the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal that she has owned the same Silly Putty for almost five years, and it "has saved me thousands of dollars in psychiatrist's fees." Coomes described the therapeutic values of Silly Putty while kneading it, bouncing it, rolling it, stretching it and lifting impressions of faces of newly engaged couples from newspaper pages; then distorting them to release her anger at a date who stood her up.
The Columbus (Ohio) Zoo used it to make casts of the hands and feet of gorillas for educational purposes. Silly Putty can also be used to clean typewriter keys, plug leaks, remove lint from clothing and steady wobbly tables. The 6 million units produced last year are three times what was produced in 1987, says Binney & Smith Inc., the Crayola crayon people who have made Silly Putty for the past 18 years. A market survey in 1990 showed that 97 percent of American households recognize the name Silly Putty and that almost 70 percent of American households have purchased it at some time. In 1990, they added four fluorescent colors -- magenta, orange, green and yellow. In 1991, Glow in the Dark Silly Putty arrived. Most pieces, still packed in plastic eggs, are priced under $2. But Classic Silly Putty is still the best seller.
The man who made it all possible was Hodgson. In 1949 he went to work in New Haven for an advertising agency, which folded in six months. Out of work and broke, this restless, energetic 37-year-old was searching for something to do when he met up with "gupp." Gupp also had no place to go. It had been discovered six years earlier by James Wright, an engineer in General Electric's New Haven laboratory. Seeking to develop a synthetic rubber, Wright combined boric acid and silicone oil and got bouncing putty.
Already $12,000 in debt, Hodgson borrowed $147 to buy a batch of the stuff. He and some part-time workers from Yale University, balled the putty up in 1-ounce portions and tucked into plastic eggs (Easter was coming. The price was about $1 a piece. Hodgson got Doubleday bookstores to take his product. But Silly Putty sales didn't really roll until August when it was mentioned in The New Yorker magazine's "Talk of the Town" section Aug. 26.
Hodgson's phone rang for four days, and he had a quarter-million orders. He moved his production operation into a converted barn on Totoket Road in North Branford. In the next 17 years, the company expanded into Canada and West Germany, and annual sales reached $5 million. Silly Putty made Hodgson a very wealthy man. He and his wife, Margaret, lived in Madison in a mansion, with a tennis court and swimming pool, on 88 partially wooded acres overlooking Long Island Sound. Their place came to be known as 'The Silly Putty Estate'. Hodgson died there at age 64 in 1976, leaving an estate of $140 million. And that ain't silly.
The frisbee was very popular in the '50's and '60's and continues its popularity to this day. In 1871, shortly after the civil war, William Russell Frisbie moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut, from Bransford in order to manage a new bakery, a branch of the Olds Baking Company. After a short time W.R. Frisbie bought the bakery, situated on 363 Kossuth Street, and renamed it the 'Frisbie Pie Company'. The company grew and at its peak in 1958 was producing 80,000 pies per day. The Frisbie Pie company opened up close to the college which later became Yale (1887) and there are strong links with Yale as to the origination of the Frisbee.
The more popular theory is that of the pie tin. Yale students frequently bought the Frisbie Pies and after eating them would toss the empty pie tin or prototype Frisbee around the Yale campus. Metal pie dishes are not the softest of missiles to be hit with and this led to throwers signalling the catcher of the approaching "Frisbee".
The evolution of the frisbee into a plastic disc is accredited to Fred Morrison, who came from an investive background. After the end of the second world war he started to develop flying discs. UFO's and flying saucers were beginning to hold people's attention and he decided to try and turn the idea into a craze. Morrison had the idea of producing a plastic flying disc and working in conjunction with Warren Francioni (who is given little credit for his involvement) they produced the first crude attempt at a plastic disc.
Morrison took his first tinite disc to the Southern Californian Plastics Company in Los Angeles in 1948, and after scraping together enough money to make a mould for the injection moulding process, the first plastic plying discs were produced.
In 1958 the frisbie pie factory shut down and Fred Morrison was awarded the "flying disc" patent. On May 26, 1959, in a bid by Wham-O to create a catchy name for its disc products, the word 'Frisbee' became a registered trademark. Knerr picked up the term while on a trip around the campuses of the Ivy League. Harvard students told him how they had been throwing pie tins around for years and calling it 'Frisbie-ing'.
The terms 'Frisbie' and 'Frisbie-ing' appealed to Knerr and he borrowed them for use at Wham-O. Being unaware of the significance or the historical aspects of these words he mis-spelled them as Frisbee! After the 'Pluto Platter', the 'Sailing Satellite', the 'Sputnik' and the 'Flying Saucer', Wham-O produced the world's first Frisbee. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Oh, one last word: obviously, it simply is not possible to fit every fad, toy or trend into my allotted space, but let us not forget the loveable 'Slinky'. Here's to you, Slinky...And, of course, MOE would be a real yoyo to forget the. . .
And, of course, MOE
would be a real yoyo to forget the. . .
