A Close Shave
From Burma-Shave and Noxzema to vintage advertising and a wife’s misguided gift, who knew shaving could be such a cutthroat business?
There are two types of men in the world: those who use a razor and shaving cream, and those who use an electric shaver. And woe to the wife who doesn’t know which man she is married to, as our story will soon illustrate.
The year is 1987, and yes, it is a far different world. For one, newspapers, real seven-day-a-week newspapers that leave your fingers ink-stained after reading and are delivered to your door by a neighborhood kid, are at the center of every town you care to live in. The town I care to live in is Wausau, Wisconsin, a picturesque city of about 40,000 in northcentral Wisconsin.
And yes, Wausau has a newspaper.
In 1987, I was the Features Editor of the Wausau Daily Herald. Walk into the newsroom, and you practically bump into me. I’m the guy sitting behind an L-shaped desk that redefines the meaning of disorganized. Press releases, half-used reporter’s notebooks, old newspapers, a coffee cup, and various odds and ends that probably should be filed or thrown in the garbage litter my work area. Life is messy but good. I’m young, surrounded by other young people, and in love with my job. You can tell that because the guy in front of you in 1987 has a perpetual smile on his face. (He also, unfortunately, sports a mustache that will take years to live down, but discussion of that misguided fashion decision is best left for another day.)
The newsroom, with the rhythmic click-click-clicking of keyboards and the constant metallic brrrring of ringing phones, throbs with caffeinated characters. Reporters, as passionate as newlyweds, and editors, as easily swayed as granite, share a give-and-take relationship. Editorial fireworks are common. Arguments pop up like bottle rockets on the Fourth of July — and fade just as fast. The great peacemaker? An unforgiving daily deadline, the stop sign that forges a begrudging truce … until tomorrow, when the mini drama unfolds anew.
What’s not to love?
Well, on this day in 1987, what’s not to love in the newsroom is a wife’s gift. See that fellow over there to the right of me, the short guy with the yellow-blond hair and permanent half-smirk on his face who looks like someone just told him an off-colored joke and he’s running the punch line through his head? That’s Pat Rice, our best reporter, a pal, and the hero of this story. Rice is smart, quick on his feet, cocky as the day is long, relentless, and born to aggravate people in powerful positions. Better than anyone I know, he exemplifies an adage that describes the role of a newspaper: “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”
That’s Rice, only today he is more afflicted than comfortable.
Image courtesy Richmond Auctions.
The problem? His wife gave him an electric shaver as a present. Rice is strictly a razor and shaving cream guy. She should know that, he confides in me. The electric shaver is too loud in the morning, he complains. It doesn’t shave as closely as his razor, he whines. And, to top it off, Rice misses the smell of his Barbasol shaving cream, he grumbles. All legit reasons. Rice would tell his wife the same, only he doesn’t want to hurt her feelings. Or, more likely, he’s afraid of her. Same difference. What he really wants is for others to do the job for him.
So, Rice hatches a plan. He will shave half his face with his new electric shaver and half with his old razor and shaving cream, then he will make the rounds to county officials, law enforcement, and local political types—the same folks he harasses on a regular basis—and ask them which side of his face feels smoother. He’ll then gather their opinions and write a story about the experience.
To sweeten the pot, Rice agrees to pose for a picture with half his face lathered in shaving cream and the other half with an electric shaver about to attack his stubble.
The whole idea is ridiculous. No serious journalist would ever risk his reputation like this. It was silly. Which is why I jumped on the idea. The story and large image of Rice in all his unshaven glory highlighted the front page of our Sunday Features section. Our readers loved it.
Silly, it turns out, can be sublime.
Of course, the shaving world had long ago figured that out. Burma-Shave launched the most famously silly—and effective—advertising campaign in history in 1925. The brushless shaving cream company’s celebrated advertising gimmick consisted of posting light-hearted rhyming poems on six small sequential highway signs. Messages such as “Are your whiskers/When you wake/ Tougher than/A two-bit steak?/Try/ Burma-Shave” dotted the landscape.
Burma-Shave’s timing was impeccable. By the 1920s, commercial signs and billboards turned America’s roadsides into an advertising hotbed. Allan Odell, sales manager of the family-owned Burma-Vita Company, created the serial roadside rhymes to advertise the company’s shaving cream. He was inspired by a string of signs leading to a service station in Illinois, each sign promoting a product or service available at the station.
The earliest Burma-Shave signs were wildly successful in boosting sales. Some verses merely extolled the product—“Every day/We do our part/To make/Your face/A work of art/Burma Shave”—while others celebrated intimacy with the opposite sex—“Dewhiskered/Kisses/Defrost/The/Misses/Burma-Shave.” Gradually, the company introduced “public service announcements” in the form of playful reminders to drive safely or suffer the consequences: “Drinking drivers/Enhance their/Chance/To highball home/In an ambulance/ Burma-Shave.”
The ad campaign reached its zenith in the early 1950s when 7,000 sets of roadside signs were displayed throughout the country. While Burma-Shave survived the Depression and the wartime economy, it couldn’t ride out what was right around the bend: speed.
The Interstate Highway System was officially started on June 29, 1956, when President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act. The new system of better roads allowed for faster travel, which made Burma-Shave signs impossible to read. As highway speeds rose, Burma-Shave sales crashed. In 1963, the family-owned company was sold to Phillip Morris. The well-known signs were removed from roads soon afterward, ending a nearly 40-year advertising campaign. By 1966, the original shaving cream had been pulled from shelves.
The death of Burma-Shave did not, however, mean the end of shaving advertising goofiness.
The same year of Burma-Shave’s demise, TV viewers were exposed to a beautiful Swedish model named Gunilla Knutson holding a can of shaving cream to her cheek. Knutson, gazing seductively into a camera, purred, “Nothing takes it off like Noxzema medicated shave.” A jazzy tune called “The Stripper” played as a man shaved his face in rhythmic strokes to the bump-and-grind of the music.
When the camera returned to a tight close-up of Knutson, she uttered seven of the most famous words in advertising history. “Take it off,” she commanded. “Take it all off.”
And, for the first time in history, men did as they were told. From 1965 to 1968, thanks in large part to Knutson’s double-entendre commercials, Noxzema rose from sixth to the third most popular shaving cream in the U.S. Knutson, who was crowned Miss Sweden in 1961, “replaced the ‘hard sell’ with the ‘sex sell’” The Times-Herald of Vallejo, California, wrote in 1968.
Shortly after that, Noxzema paired New York Jets star quarterback Joe Namath with another young model by the name of Farrah Fawcett in a wonderfully campy commercial first aired during the 1973 Super Bowl. The commercial opens with a grinning Namath saying, “I’m so exited. I’m gonna get creamed!” Fawcett, who in three short years would star in TV’s Charlie’s Angels, then applies shaving cream to Namath’s face as a background jingle instructs viewers to “Let Noxzema cream your face, so the razor won’t.” At the end of the commercial, Namath compliments Fawcett, saying, “You’ve got a great pair of hands.”
Most advertising historians view the 30-second spot as the first massively effective and memorable Super Bowl commercial, pioneering the use of sex appeal and celebrity power in Super Bowl advertising. How transformational was the commercial? Well, in 1973, that 30-second Noxzema spot cost about $88,000. Today, a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl will fetch around $8 million.
As for Fawcett, the commercial supercharged the 26-year-old’s career. In 1976, her sun-kissed face framed by cascading blond hair would adorn the most popular pinup poster in history, selling 12 million copies worldwide. The poster’s cultural impact was so profound that a copy of it, along with Fawcett’s original red swimsuit she wore on the poster, is in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. That same year, her role as private detective Jill Munroe in Charlie’s Angels transformed her into a star.
Image courtesy Heritage Auctions.
That’s all fine and dandy, you might fairly say, but whatever happened to Rice and his electric shaver dilemma? Good question. It turns out the various officials who caressed and contemplated his freshly shaven face overwhelmingly preferred the razor and shaving cream performance over that of the electric shaver.
Rice was pleased. His wife? Not so much. Odd as it may have seemed to Rice at the time, being embarrassed by your husband for your gift-giving choice in the newspaper did not sit well on the home front. His wife’s irritation with the story gave new meaning to the term “razor burn.”
Much like the once ubiquitous Burma-Shave signs, however, everything, including marital disputes, has an expiration date. Calm eventually returned to the household, but only after the electric razor was thrown out —narrowly missing Rice’s head.
Paul Kennedy is the former Editorial Director of Kovels Antique Trader magazine. He uses a razor and shaving cream almost daily, less now that he is retired.
You may also like:
Paul Kennedy is Editorial Director of the Collectibles Group at AIM Media. He enjoys Mid-century design, photography, vintage movie posters and people with a good story to share. Kennedy has more than twenty-five years of experience in the antiques and collectibles field, including book publishing. Reach him at PKennedy@aimmedia.com.
