On the rollercoaster of taste, the lawn flamingo—America’s ersatz flower—has enjoyed a 48-year ride. (Make that 69..,and counting.)
An Austin, Texas, yard stopped presidential motorcades and more.
At a garden center on the rich side of Austin, Texas, where all personal vehicles are war-ready and the children blond, a hillside is covered most of the year with pink plastic flamingos. Rumor had it that when Bill Clinton was last in town, he dropped by and bought two of the yard birds. On our walk this morning we spotted six of them, each tilting on one leg in a yard otherwise dignified (and dull), covered in English ivy.
Okay, so they’re not flowers. But as this neighbor realizes they add a shock of color to the flower-challenged lawn, an easy out for those of us with too much shade, too harsh sun or too little energy. Plus Emily Young of the Sentinel and Enterprise (Massachusetts) has an article today about the pink plastic flamingo’s creator, Donald Featherstone.
Donald Featherstone, creator of the crook-neck wonder, with his wife Nancy in 1997.
Photo: Kevin Kolczynski
Featherstone studied art and then went to work for Union Products, where he was asked to design 3-D lawn ornaments for the booming suburbanite market of the 1950s. Featherstone came up with 700 ideas. He preferred a plastic ostrich but the public overwhelmingly went for the flamingo. “His muse was an Oct. 1957 National Geographic cover, which featured ballerinas in pink.”
The flamingo may have once been a whimsy, something to watch over the wading pool and distract from all that bare yard, but it has since become an object of cultural analysis and, as the Clinton purchase suggests, an item of nostalgia.
Featherstone’s wife Nancy contends, “When the flamingo turned 30, it graduated its status level and the wealthy took it over. It wasn’t tacky anymore, it was trendy.”
We’re not so sure, Nancy. Shifts in cultural status can be on the order of “graduation,” but the flamingo seems more of a transfer student—from low-class to camp. We’ll leave this matter to the Taste Police, and urge both chief officers and beat cops thereof to write in.
To boot, we offer more pink flamingo photos and stuff, plus this call for a boycott of “fake” fake pink flamingos (the arbiters of consumption will not be denied!). Here also is a tremendously silly site On Stagnant Pond, recommended if you’re having a somber day.
(Originally published: HFP August 24, 2005)
Update: We’re sorry to report that On Stagnant Pond is nowhere to be found now, a real disappointment for those of us averse to Henry Fonda. Donald Featherstone died in June of 2015, on the eve of Pink Flamingo Day.
Real flamingos pale in comparison with Featherstone’s plastic birds.
Far more distressing, we read that the beloved pink feathers of Kenya’s flamingos are fading. Naturalist Paul Gatheru explained to Africa News that with increasing rainfall, the alkaline waters of the Rift Valley are becoming more like freshwater lakes.
“Flamingos depend on cyanobacteria, a microscopic organism rich in carotenoid pigments that gives the birds their distinctive pink feathers.
“As this food source declines, … the birds not only lose their color but are also forced to migrate in search of more suitable habitats.”
West Austin won’t likely be one of them.
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