Billboards, trees and a long and winding road

Funny how one thought can lead to another until, rather like the famous parlor game of “Telephone,” you wind up somewhere far different from where you started. A news story can be like that. Today, I start on Rand Road in Arlington Heights and wind up humming Tom Waits somewhere out West.

We rev our engines at the Arlington Performance Center, an auto repair shop just west of Arlington Heights Road. It is home to two of only three billboards in town, and this week, the village board said they’ll have to come down. The signs were already in place when Arlington Heights annexed the area in 1981, so they were exempted from the village’s ban on billboards. When the owner of Arlington Performance Center came before the village board Monday to seek permission to build five townhouses behind the business, trustees saw their chance.

“What can you do to help us with beautification, so to speak, because there’s a reason why we don’t allow billboards anymore,” Trustee Jim Bertucci asked.

“I do agree with the policy of not having billboards in town generally,” Mayor Tom Hayes chimed in, adding, “And this one is just in such a location on Rand Road where we really need to clean that up. So this is our opportunity.”

Trustees gave the owner five years to rid the roadside of the apparent eyesore. In his story about the issue, writer Christopher Placek noted that Arlington Heights is one of only a few suburbs that is so restrictive when it comes to billboards, which triggered for me the lines from Ogden Nash, channeling Joyce Kilmer, “I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all.”

It seemed relevant to find that when the Rand Road billboards fall, it would open the passerby’s view to a grove of mature trees behind the repair shop but for the fact that most of those trees likely will be removed to make room for the townhouses.

Which took me back to Kilmer, whose poem “Trees” extolled the supremacy of nature over even the best that the human imagination can produce and provided the foundation for Nash's wry humor.

Which led me to ponder the stunning array of advertising messages that turn the blue sky into little more than a bulletin board along our tollways. Perhaps the most prominent of these messages are the varied cute phrases featuring former Bears great Brian Urlacher and others touting the RESTORE hair growth system.

Which reminded me of perhaps the most famous billboard advertising campaign of all time, ironically for a company that was devoted to hair removal, Burma Shave shaving cream.

The billboards featured a series of separate panels ending with the one naming the product. An example: “The Wolf / Is Shaved / So Neat and Trim / Red Riding Hood / Is Chasing Him / Burma Shave” Or, how about: “The One Who Drives When / He’s Been Drinking / Depends On You / To Do His Thinking / Burma Shave” There were dozens of others.

Singer-songwriter Tom Waits — I told you we’d get here — recalls driving across the country with his family as a child in the late 1950s and early 1960s and thinking the panels were announcing the coming of a town named “Burma Shave.” “When will we get to Burma Shave?” he would ask his dad. Later he would integrate that theme into a song called “Burma Shave” about a drifter and a female hanger-on who head out into the wilderness in hopes of escaping a boring small-town existence, only to end up dying — somewhat ironically, as it happens, considering the number of Burma Shave themes involving safe driving — in an alcohol-related crash.

All this from a little item about a suburban controversy over advertising and aesthetics. Always remember, a newspaper can ignite your ideas and your imagination. Where you ultimately arrive is up to you.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher.