If you are under fifty you probably never saw them, so let me tell you what you missed. You'd be driving along a two-lane highway in the country, nothing much to look at but corn and fence posts, and there by the fence would be a little red sign with a few words on it in white. Then another one a little way on. Then another. Six of them in a row, each one carrying one line of a rhyme, and the joke came on the fifth one, and the sixth one told you who had paid for the whole business: Burma-Shave, a brushless shaving cream. People my age can't seem to stop talking about those signs, and I am no exception.

My name is Ed Irish. I'm 71 years old. I sold and serviced farm machinery in southern Minnesota for thirty-eight years, and I retired in 1994, and my wife Betty says I have been underfoot ever since. Last winter I took the computer class they offered at the library, and this is what came of it. This page is about those signs: what it was like to read them from the back seat, how they worked, why they went away, and what I think makes a good set. On the second page are forty sets of my own, which I have been writing since a year ago last fall. Betty reads every one before it goes up. She groans at the good ones.

One thing before we start. You won't find any of the old rhymes on this page. Part of the reason is I don't trust my memory to get them word for word after sixty years, and the rest is that they weren't mine. Somebody else wrote those, and somebody else got paid for them. Everything in red on these two pages is my own.

I was born in 1928 on a farm about six miles from town. Dad bought a used Ford in 1936, a black two-door, and that car was the biggest thing that happened to our family in the whole Depression. Before it we went to town in the truck, two in the cab and the rest in the box. After it we went on Sunday drives.

There were three of us in the back seat. My sister Carolyn was the oldest, and she could read anything, so she always got the first sign. I was in the middle. Harold was the baby and couldn't read at all, which turned out not to matter, because the sixth sign always said the same thing, and by the time he was four he knew what it looked like. So Carolyn would read the first line and I'd read the second and we'd fight over the rest, and then Harold would holler "BURMA-SHAVE!" at the top of his lungs like he had written the whole thing himself. Every time. My mother would say "Harold, inside voice," and my dad would laugh, and that was a Sunday.

The thing you have to understand is that you could not read ahead. The signs were far enough apart that you had to wait for the next one, and you'd sit there with your nose on the window waiting for it. If a truck was coming the other way and you missed the fourth line, it was ruined, and you had to hope you'd come back the same road. Dad would not turn around for a sign. We asked.

Some sets stayed up a long time and some changed, so a road you drove every week might have a new one on it in the spring. There was one set on the way to my grandmother's that we must have read two hundred times, and when it was replaced with a new one, Carolyn was so put out she didn't speak for ten miles. Then she read us the new one.

During the war gas was rationed and the limit was 35 miles an hour to save the tires, and we didn't go anywhere we didn't have to, so there were a few years without many Sunday drives. By the time things loosened up I was driving myself, and I'll admit I still read every set I passed, out loud, alone in the pickup. Betty and I were married in 1951 and our kids got the tail end of it. By the time our youngest could read, there weren't many left to read.

I spent my working life in a business where you put your name on everything you could, feed caps and yardsticks and calendars and thermometers, so I have thought about these signs more than is probably healthy. Here is how they worked, as best I understand it.

• They started right here. The company was a Minnesota outfit, and the first signs went up along Minnesota roads in the 1920s. From here they spread over most of the country.
• They were small and plain. A little board on a post or two, red, with white letters. No pictures. You could have carried one under your arm. That was part of it: nobody was shouting at you.
• One line to a sign. Each sign had a few words, and the rhyme ran across five of them, and the sixth was the name.
• They were spaced for reading. Far enough apart that you had a few seconds with each one at the speed people drove then, and couldn't see the next one yet. That's the whole trick. A rhyme you can see all at once is a poster. A rhyme you have to wait for is a joke with a punch line.
• They sat on farmers' land. The signs went up along a farmer's fence line, and the farmer got a little something every year for the spot. I knew a man who had a set on his corner for years and was prouder of it than of his corn.
• The rhymes changed with the times. At first they were mostly about shaving and whiskers and how your girl felt about your whiskers. As time went on a good many of them were about driving safe, and I believe those did some good. A sermon you'd ignore. A rhyme you'd remember.

My own arithmetic on the spacing. I am a numbers man, so I worked this out with Betty's calculator. A car going 35 miles an hour covers about 51 feet every second. At 55 it's about 80 feet a second, and at 65 it's about 95. Say you want three seconds with each sign, which is about what it takes to read four words and think about them. At 35 your signs want to be about 150 feet apart. At 55 they want to be about 240 feet apart, so a set of six (five gaps between six signs) stretches out to 1,200 feet, which is close to a quarter of a mile. At 65 on the interstate you'd need almost 300 feet between signs, and by then the fellow has forgotten the first line before he gets to the fourth. Which brings us to the next part.

By the middle of the 1960s they were gone. I don't have any inside knowledge about it, only what I saw from the road and what I've read since, but here is how I see it.

The roads changed. The signs were made for two-lane highways where you went 35 or 40 and had time to look around. When the four-lanes and the interstates came through, the traffic went over there, and it went 65, and nobody was going to read six little signs at 65. The old roads are still there, and I drive them on purpose, but most people don't.

The cars changed. Cars got quieter and faster and had radios in them, and the windows were up, and the kids in the back had something else to do. A set of signs is a conversation, and nobody was listening anymore.

The business changed. It costs money to keep thousands of signs painted and standing and the farmers paid, and the company changed hands in the sixties, and the signs came down. I don't know the inside of it and I won't guess. I was in business thirty-eight years and I know there is always more to a decision than the people outside can see.

Billboards didn't go away, of course. They got bigger. There's one out by the interstate now the size of a machine shed, and it has one picture and five words, and I couldn't tell you what it was for. That's the difference. Nobody ever forgot what those six little signs were for.

Betty says I've got more rules than the Lutheran church. I only have one rule, but it has seven parts.

1. Five signs to say it, one to sign it. The sixth sign is the name. On my sets that's my old store, Irish Implement, which closed in 1994. A man ought to get something out of all this.
2. Short words. Nobody reads "consequently" at 55 miles an hour. If a word won't fit on a little board in letters you can read from the road, use a smaller word.
3. The second and fourth lines rhyme. The first and third can do as they please.
4. The turn comes on the fifth sign. Don't give the joke away on sign three. The whole thing is waiting for it.
5. Poke fun at the thing, not the fellow. The car phone is funny. The man on the car phone is just a man who needs to get home to his wife. Most of the time I'm the fellow in the rhyme anyway.
6. If it can say something useful, let it. Buckle up, turn your lights on at dusk, watch for deer. You've got him for six signs. Might as well send him home in one piece.
7. Read it out loud in the car. If Betty groans, it's a keeper. If she doesn't say anything, throw it out. If she laughs, I worry I've done something wrong.

Here is one of mine, set the way it ought to be, on posts. It's number 37.

Read all forty of my sets >>
Newest: No. 40, put up September 13, 1999.

How I got started writing them. A year ago October we drove down to see our daughter's family, and somewhere past the state line I said to Betty that you never see a decent rhyme by the road anymore, and she said, "Then write one." So I did, on the back of a gas station receipt, before we got there. It was about Y2K and it wasn't very good, but it's number 1 and it stays. I kept them in a spiral notebook all winter. When the library's computer class needed a project, the teacher said a home page is just a place to put things you care about, and I had a notebook full.

If you write one of your own, send it to me. I won't put anybody else's on my page, because the whole point is that these are mine, but I'll read every one and I'll write you back. And if you remember the old signs from your own back seat, tell me where. I'd like to know which roads had them.

• Jingles I Can't Get Out of My Head — a radio producer's history of the advertising jingle, and why it works. Same idea as the signs, if you ask me, only with a tune.
• Hand Lettered by C. Iversen — a son remembers his dad, who painted signs in northeast Iowa for forty-four years. I knew men like him. Every implement dealer did.
• Hank & Peggy's Great American Road Trip — two retirees, one conversion van and the whole country one state at a time. Betty would like to know why we aren't doing this.