Environment: Mysterious Billboard

As billboards go, it’s a real stopper—a huge closeup photo of a pimply faced, wild-haired hippie, mounted on a ghastly yellow background and bearing the message, in red and black letters: BEAUTIFY AMERICA, GET A HAIRCUT. The poster has lately appeared on roadsides across the nation, generating no end of speculation about who or what is behind the campaign.

Some citizens of Atlanta, which boasts 80 of the billboards, worry that right-wingers were involved. In Miami, the posters are thought to be the handiwork of an eccentric millionaire; in Lancaster, Ohio, they are signed by the Lancaster Mothers’ Association. Alas, though many mothers feel desperate enough to start such a campaign, a Lancaster Mothers’ Association does not exist.

The real source is Miami’s Donnelly Advertising Co., the giant outdoor ad agency. Donnelly failed to sell the idea to Gillette, but when the agency included a slide of the billboard as comic relief in its sales pitch at last summer’s outdoor advertising convention in St. Louis, the boys instantly recognized it as just the thing to stimulate what they like to call “billboard awareness.” Donnelly to date has sold 1,500 of the 24-panel posters to billboard owners in all 50 states at $8.50 each.

A Marine battalion commander at Camp Pendleton, Calif., has posted wall-size copies in his unit’s barracks “as an inspiration to our troops,” and residents of Shreveport, La., are thinking of having bumper stickers made up along similar lines. As for Donnelly, it is planning to start pasting them on its own billboards this week, and the agency’s John Donnelly Jr. knows exactly where he wants the first one to go: Harvard Square.