craigdailypress.com

Craig — Many years ago, when Mary Jo Brown would drive her children - now grown - to Denver, she remembers the family reading old Burma-Shave signs along the road.

"They were kind of lines, one after the other," Brown said. "They were a rhyming thing."

Now, other drivers will read her words along the highway.

The Wyman Museum selected one of Brown's entries as a winner for its sign contest, a play on the old Burma-Shave formula.

Burma-Shave used a series of signs, each with a portion of one rhyme, and drivers would read each one to get to the punch line at the end, Wyman Museum Curator Nicky Boulger said.

Brown's sign reads: "Gotta stop / Yep, gotta see 'em / Wonderful things / At the Wyman Museum."

Such signs during Burma-Shave's days "were all over the United States," Boulger said. "If you talk to the older generation, they remember driving along, and it would pass the time to see these and get to the punchline."

Wyman Museum officials selected three entries out of 33 to place on highways around Craig, Boulger said, including ones from Delaine Voloshin and Jennifer Rayles, in addition to Brown's.

Public participation exceeded the response Boulger originally thought the contest might draw. Entries came from all kinds of people, even a few from school children.

"It was the first time we did this," she said. "And you feel it out, and gauge public interest and go from there. We're hoping we can do another contest next year."

Brown's entry currently occupies space along the road leading to the Wyman Museum but will be placed on a highway sometime when the weather is warmer, Boulger said.

"That's the one set completely done now, and we'll get the others done at some point," the curator said. "Right now, the ground is too hard - it's frozen - to stick them on the road, so we stuck these in the snow until we can get them in the ground."

Boulger said she called some landowners with property in the area, and they agreed to let the museum plant the signs along the road. She still has to get approval from the Colorado Department of Transportation.

Eventually, Boulger would like to see the signs further out, possibly along I-80 and other, bigger thoroughfares.

"Gosh, just to get someone to decide to make a turn and come this way," she said.

Brown entered the contest for kicks and is happy to see her entry used, she said.

"It's exciting," she said. "I love to write. Just to have something that I wrote out there for everybody to see, it's awesome. I'm just honored that they picked me, and I hope I do their business justice.

"And I'm a sucker for contests. Except dancing and juggling."

Collin Smith can be reached at 824-7031, ext. 209, or cesmith@craigdailypress.com