Or, What Hognose Learned Along The Road Of Life

By Senior Correspondent Kevin R.C. "Hognose" O'Brien

When I was a kid, one of the pleasures of riding with my grandfather was that he drove like hell. Another was his running commentary on the Way Things Used To Be, and one of those things he would mention was Burma Shave signs.

Burma Shave was a popular shaving goop in the middle decades of the 20th Century, when the safety razor was catching on. Whether or not people of a certain age ever used it -- I reckon not enough of them did, or you would still see it in stores -- everybody knew about the signs, Burma Shave, you see, was promoted by a series of roadside signs; they were smaller than billboards and usually amounted to a set of five signs. The first four signs contained the parts of a rhyming, often memorable couplet, and the last one said: Burma Shave.

In my childhood, Burma Shave was already an "old" thing, but when the company that paid for the signs stopped paying for them, it didn't pay to take them down either, and some of them stood for years, until the anti-billboard movement, that itself was unleashed by some other couplets by Ogden Nash, brought most of them down. Perhaps, in some firmly libertarian rural district, some of them still stand. The signs were always humorous, and only occasionally were directly promotional. Usually, they focused on something dear to all our hearts: safety. I was reminded of this today by an email from a friend, containing a number of Burma Shave signs. There are uncanny parallels between Burma Shave's highway safety messages and the ones we need to heed as pilots.

After some unpleasant mishaps, the lines, and then the FAA in 1981, mandated the "sterile cockpit" in FAR 121. and 135.100. But violations still happen, so it's still a concern. It's not like inattention to the task at hand was a newly discovered threat. Burma Shave understood it decades ago, when airliners were made of wood:

TRAINS DON'T WANDER
ALL OVER THE MAP
'CAUSE NOBODY SITS
IN THE ENGINEER'S LAP
Burma Shave

CAUTIOUS RIDER
TO HER RECKLESS DEAR
LET'S HAVE LESS BULL
AND MORE STEER
Burma Shave

At about the same age that I would blast through the countryside in Gamuck's Oldsmobile at illegal speeds, I was reading my dad's aviation magazines. The one I remember the most is Flying, which still has some of the same writers (Dick Collins and Peter Garrison). It was certainly there that I first heard the term "get-home-itis." We have many ways of saying it; one of my favorites is to note that the funeral for a pilot who dies in weather is usually on a sunny day. Burma Shave had its way of making a similar point (not that it influenced Gamuck's driving any).

DON'T LOSE YOUR HEAD
TO GAIN A MINUTE
YOU NEED YOUR HEAD
YOUR BRAINS ARE IN IT
Burma Shave

BROTHER SPEEDER
LET'S REHEARSE
ALL TOGETHER
GOOD MORNING, NURSE
Burma Shave

A GUY WHO DRIVES
A CAR WIDE OPEN
IS NOT THINKIN'
HE'S JUST HOPIN'
Burma Shave

We often say that "the FARs are written in the blood of good men and women." That's certainly true of the crew rest rules under part 121 and 135. Well, Burma Shave knew all about crew rest:

DROVE TOO LONG
DRIVER SNOOZING
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
IS NOT AMUSING
Burma Shave

Then there are always the accidents that are due to maintenance, usually those other human errors that get us. They're pretty rare but they still crop up. And yet, even some of those are preventable.

SPEED WAS HIGH
WEATHER WAS HOT
TIRES WERE THIN
X MARKS THE SPOT
Burma Shave

Then, there's substance abuse. From some of the ranting in the press, you'd think that fermentation had just been discovered. Well, it's been around just about as long as agriculture and towns, and just that long some people have been moved by spirits in inappropriate ways. I'm not too sanguine about the ability of regulations to stop this behavior, so I don't think Burma Shave's approach would work either. But you can't fault them for trying.

THE MIDNIGHT RIDE
OF PAUL FOR BEER
LED TO A WARMER HEMISPHERE
Burma Shave

THE ONE WHO DRIVES
WHEN HE'S BEEN DRINKING
DEPENDS ON YOU
TO DO HIS THINKING
Burma Shave

CAR IN DITCH
DRIVER IN TREE
THE MOON WAS FULL
AND SO WAS HE.
Burma Shave

Sometimes it's not a matter of maintenance, but of observing the limitations of your aircraft. We are all familiar with the operating limitations in the POH (or operating limitations document, for experimentals?)

AROUND THE CURVE
LICKETY-SPLIT
BEAUTIFUL CAR
WASN'T IT?
Burma Shave

And there are the ones that warn not about specific transgressions one might make, but rather about the consequences of the same.

AT INTERSECTIONS
LOOK EACH WAY
A HARP SOUNDS NICE
BUT IT'S HARD TO PLAY
Burma Shave

Finally, Burma Shave's copywriters wouldn't have been card-carrying denizens of the First American Century if they had always used negative imagery in their safety ads. Both of these are so true in aviation I can scarcely imagine them being about driving. The first is most applicable to those of us fortunate enough to fly the new, space-age panels that are exploding into GA. The message I take from it is, if you are willing to spend $10,000 on your panel, spend a few thousand on your skills.

NO MATTER THE PRICE
NO MATTER HOW NEW
THE BEST SAFETY DEVICE
IN THE CAR IS YOU
Burma Shave

BOTH HANDS ON THE WHEEL
EYES ON THE ROAD
THAT'S THE SKILLFUL
DRIVER'S CODE
Burma Shave

One of the funny things about my rediscovery of the value of this doggerel (or Americana!) is that many years ago, I overslept and was left with some abominable choices at Freshman registration at my first college, Holy Cross. One of the courses I wound up taking, because all the other must-be-hip-and-unique-like-everyone-else teen cynics would be fed to lions before they took it, was Introduction to Poetry, with professor Meyer. As I made my grim way home from registration, I thought it the worst of the bunch: worse that the history class with a doctrinaire Stalinist, worse than Cultural Anthropology which was dedicated to the proposition that incest and cannibalism are, you know, perfectly valid choices, and we shouldn't judge the little heathens. But -- fortunately -- I was wrong. Professor Meyer was a great teacher, inspiring enough that I one day confessed my former distaste for his subject to him, and he laughed.

"Don't make the mistake of assuming that poetry is a dry, academic study," he said with a grin. "You never know when you'll use it."

Indeed.

I don't think I can get Gordon Pratt at Chelton to add the Burma Shave couplets to the company's EFIS, which already has everything else. But when you're out there in the sky, maybe you want to keep a memory or two of these Burma Shave signs.

Maybe there was a reason many farmers kept them up for decades after Burma Shave was sold to Philip Morris in 1963 and stopped paying for the signs.

www.fiftiesweb.com/burma.htm