61 Wild Bumper Stickers That Prove Some People Have Absolutely No Filter (New Pics)

Before anyone could slap a joke about their cat onto a bumper, advertising on cars was a clunky business. Early vehicle signs were chunks of cardboard or metal fastened on with wire, and one of the biggest fans was Lester Dill, the showman behind Meramec Caverns in Missouri. While visitors toured his cave, he sent employees into the parking lot to tie souvenir signs onto their cars, which turned every tourist into a free billboard on wheels. No glue, no style, just string and nerve.

The sticky version showed up in the 1940s, and the credit usually goes to Forest Gill, a silkscreen printer from Kansas City who had launched his business in his basement back in 1934.

Around 1946, according to the Florida Historic Capitol Museum, Gill combined two wartime leftovers, adhesive backed paper and fluorescent paint, and made something that outlasted the homemade signs. That glow came in handy, since a message needs to grab attention fast when the audience is speeding past. The story goes that he strolled into a parking lot and measured actual bumpers to figure out the right size. Those early paper versions had gummy glue, so removing one was an exercise in patience and regret.

Tourist attractions jumped on the idea first. Gill’s company landed its first big order, 25,000 stickers, from Marine Gardens, an attraction in Clearwater, Florida, and promoters would often stick them onto visitors’ cars while their owners were still inside having fun. Consent was optional. Politics muscled in next.

The first documented political use came in 1952, when Eisenhower and Stevenson battled for the White House, and Gill later made much of his money from election years, with the big orders arriving right after the party conventions. Paper eventually gave way to vinyl, which was promoted in the 1950s and caught on in the 1960s.

A bumper sticker was only expected to last two to four weeks, so being easy to remove became a selling point, according to research from a conservator at the University of Kansas Libraries. Anyone who has tried to scrape one off a decade old hatchback knows how that promise turned out.

Then 1984 delivered the bright yellow diamond that changed the game. Michael Lerner, a former real estate investor, drove his 18 month old nephew home, got tailgated and cut off the whole way, and soon licensed a safety sign that two sisters had spotted in Europe. The first batch of Baby on Board signs sold 10,000 copies in a month, and within a year more than 3 million cars were wearing one.

The profits helped Lerner’s company, Safety 1st, branch out into outlet plugs, cabinet locks and other child safety gear, which is a respectable second act for a novelty sign. The jokers were not far behind. Baby Driving, Baby Carries No Cash and Grandma on Board flooded the market, and in parts of the New York area the knockoffs reportedly outnumbered the real thing five to one. The cherry on top is that Lerner never had children of his own.

By 2008, researchers at Colorado State University were asking who exactly drives around with all these messages. In one experiment, cars wearing stickers or other personal markers honked nearly two full seconds sooner when blocked at a green light. Researchers also reported that the number of markers predicted road rage better than a car’s value or condition. The wording did not seem to matter, since even drivers displaying messages of love and acceptance landed in the more aggressive group, so the car politely urging you to visualize world peace may be the one riding your tail.

All of this helps explain why the bumper sticker is such a strange little genre. It began as a souvenir, grew up as campaign merchandise, and eventually became a way to share one opinion with strangers traveling at forty miles an hour. Proud honor student announcements and their cheeky rebuttals still share the road.

Add cheap vinyl, endless jokes and the fact that nobody needs permission to stick one on, and you get a medium where a gentle plea for peace can sit a few inches from a message that makes absolutely no sense. Forest Gill lived to the age of 99, long enough to watch his invention become one of the most opinionated objects in America. Not bad for something that started with string.