Who Made That Bumper Sticker? One day in the mid-1940s, Forest Gill, the owner of a print shop, knelt down in a Kansas City parking lot and measured a car's bumper. Ever since the automobile age began, drivers had advertised their opinions with handmade placards tied to their cars with bits of twine. Gill realized that he could make "bumper signs" forever obsolete. Back at his desk, Gill cut out a sticker, according to his son-in-law Mark Gilman, who was a teenager working in the shop at the time. He probably called in his deputy, Ed McConnell, "and between Forest and Ed, they dummied up some copy, like "Jones for Sheriff." Then they went back to the car to see if the stickers would fit. Gill seized on two new technologies ­ - self-adhesive paper and Day-Glo paint - and combined them into a novelty item perfectly adapted for America's highways. By the 1962 presidential election, bumper stickers were everywhere, rivaling buttons as a favorite way for voters to declare their intentions. Gilman, who now runs the family print shop, said that national elections create a frenzy in the bumper-sticker business. "As soon as the conventions are over, we're kind of on pins and needles waiting to see if it's going to lead to some big orders," he said. Gilman has his eye on the Senate battle in Massachusetts. An election that's a real squeaker is best for a bumper-sticker man. Jack Bowen, author of "If You Can Read This," studies the semiotics of bumper-sticker slogans. What kind of conversation are we having on our cars? Most messages are aggressive. There's this sort of screaming back and forth, and you're much more likely to scream "Your candidate is lame" than "My candidate is good." Anyone with a sticker is the type of person who wants to be heard. Is it dangerous to engage in political debate on the highway at 60 miles per hour? There was a 2008 study by Colorado State University that showed drivers with bumper stickers displayed more road rage than those without any stickers. More interesting to me is that it didn't matter what the bumper sticker said ­ - all of them were connected with road rage. The people who had "Practice Random Acts of Kindness" bumper stickers were just as likely to rage as the "My Student Beat Up Your Honor Student" people. Are bumper stickers, as a folk art, on the decline? Yes - in fact, a lot of luxury cars don't even have bumpers anymore. That's almost sending a message in itself: "Don't put a bumper on my car. I'm not going to be bumping into things.