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You better get Wildroot Creme Oil, Charlie ...

Then you will have a tough time, Charlie,

Keeping all the girls away ...

I'm not sure Wildroot is even made these days and, as a matter of fact, I don't know if I ever used it even when it was. But I heard that enough times so I am never going to forget it.

Wildroot goes back to radio days. That is, those days now long ago and in another century when radio and not television was our chief electronic media and when your ear and not your eye concentrated on our culture.

It was at an impressionable time in life and we listened to a lot of radio.

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot,

Twelve full ounces, that's a lot.

Twice as much for a nickel, too,

Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you ...

And so it is one of the curious facts of American life that commercials are a key ingredient of how we live. Who, for instance, can forget, "Does she or doesn't she? Only her hairdresser knows" (Clairol) or "I can't believe I ate the whole thing" (Alka-Seltzer).

They've become a part of America—for better or worse (some would say for worse). Long after we've forgotten the product we remember its song and we sing it, mutter it under our breath and sometimes even use it as family greetings.

"The real thing" (Coca-Cola) or "When you care enough to give the very best" (Hallmark). You can probably think of some more.

No one knows exactly who came up with the first singing or rhyming commercial. But one of the leading candidates is Sir Thomas Beecham's father. He is supposed to have dreamed up a revision on "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing," to wit:

Hark, the herald angels sing,

Beecham's pills are just the thing.

Two for man and one for child,

Peace on earth and mercy mild.

Sir Thomas was the longtime conductor of the London Philharmonic and he was able to indulge his love of music because his father marketed (very successfully) a pill of uncertain ingredients and equally uncertain viability which made a fortune in the 19th century long before Wildroot, Clairol and other American inventions hit the market.

In those days, of course, marketers like the elder Beecham depended on the printed rather than the spoken or sung word to get their message across.

It was a time for Ivory Soap ("99 and 44 one-hundredths-percent pure. It floats"). Just why floating soap was purer than that which sunk to the bottom of the tub is not clear, but that slogan sold a lot of Ivory Soap.

Or how about cigarettes? In those days you could and every tobacco marketer did try to get you to buy their product:

"Lucky Strike Green has gone to war" ... "It's toasted" (Camels) ... "Nature in the raw is seldom mild" (but, by inference, Luckies were.)

It's no coincidence, perhaps, that the major staging camps in France near the end and after the war were all named for popular cigarette brands. Everyone could remember their names that way. My stay, as I vaguely remember it, was in Phllip Morris.

Well, thankfully, cigarette advertising is a thing of the past, but we still have beer commercials to contend with, there are Jack In The Box 30-second pleas and, of course, auto commercials.

One car pretty much looks like another these days and so do their commercials. Since they are mostly SUVs, they usually chomp through swamps, over mountains and across rocks. Not many songs go with them, though.

In the days of radio the competition for the ear was less intense perhaps than it is now. These days we are bombarded with messages and most of them seem forgettable. They come and go so rapidly and they cost so much to make that none of them last long. I can't, for instance, think of many in the present era which I sing in the shower or use as a greeting with friends or relatives.

But I can still remember things like "Wildroot Creme Oil, Charlie," or:

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Use Fitch Shampoo!

It washes your dandruff away ...