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Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for example. —John Ruskin

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n o D e n o t s r e h t a Fe

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ents n o C f Table o 03 Plastic Flamingos 12 An Interview with Don Featherstone 23 600 Custom Outfits 34 Pink Plastic Flamingo Flies off into the Sunset 41 Yards

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ercy!

M a Lawn Some things you cannot imagine being invented, cannot quite conceive being produced. Some things are just there, part of the American cultural landscape, as if they had been extruded whole from the popular psyche.

They couldn’t have been thought up—they just exist, plastic torsos balanced proudly on metal legs, bodies fading with each winter’s snow, embodying all that is tacky in America, all the would-be exotic, our whimsy molded in polyethylene. They were born in the back of our collective mind. One day an empty lawn, the next a flamingo. It is merely the spontaneous generation of American kitsch.

the Duck, and Union wanted him to press on.

For Charlie, Don Featherstone had bought a white duck from a duck farm and lived with it six months doing life studies before sitting down to sculpt. Obviously, this was not something you wanted to try with a flamingo. Nevertheless, he still put in a month of picture research before touching clay. Then, in a fit of creative fervor, he completed it in a week, from rosy breast to ebon beak. Union had the plastic bird out four months later.

As they say, it flew. Though it did not catch up with ducks until this year, the flamingo ornament nested happily in the American psyche, in the part marked Lovable Oddities. Various pink flamingo societies were formed. In the radical 70s, college campuses were “flamingoed” with hundreds of pink avians overnight. Bizarre filmmaker John Waters named an opus after the bird. And of course, hundreds of thousands of Americans put them on their lawns.

Not that Featherstone can figure out exactly who the hundreds of thousands are. “Who’s buying these things?” he asks.

“Nobody knows. You’d think it was people in poor neighborhoods. But we see plenty of them in good areas. Some people are ashamed of them, so they put them in their

Meet Don Featherstone. “Ducks are up 30 percent this year,” he says conversationally. “But for the first time ever, flamingos will outsell ducks.” In the background, as Featherstone speaks, there can be heard a steady swish-thunk, swish-thunk, swish-thunk. That is the noise of pink, plastic, 34-inch birds hot out of a blow-molding machine, sliding down a chute at the rate of one pair per minute. “The penguin is also coming up in sales,” Featherstone continues, “but I don’t think it’ll ever be a flamingo.” There is a pause. “I’d be happy to be remembered as the man who did the pink flamingo.”

It happened like this. In the late ‘40s, just as the newfound American mobility was turning Florida into a tourist magnet, America had a thing for flamingos. There were flamingo decals and flamingo shower curtains. There was even a flamingo lawn ornament, although it was flat. Then, in 1957, a forward-looking company called Union Products, Inc., in Leominster, Mass. began to experiment with 3-D ornaments. It put out a 3-D cat, a 3-D toadstool and even a fake fire hydrant. None of them sold. But Union, which had recently hired the services of a fresh-faced 21-year-old art student, did not give up. The student had done a hell of a job with an item called Charlie

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backyards. I’ve heard there are some on Beacon Hill.” Union Products does not keep state-bystate records on where the birds go, but he notes, “New Jersey buys a lot of them.”

Wherever they go, we are in the middle of a flamingo boom, and it hasn’t beaked yet. Sales began to rise in the early ‘80s, when “retro” became hip. Then came Miami Vice, which, by featuring the live item in its opening montage, did the same thing for the lawn-flamingo industry it has done for the linen jacket biz: Union will sell 250,000 birds this year, as against 80,000 in 1976. The surge bothers some aficionados. “It could be the Unicorn of the ‘80s,” says Amy Loughery, owner of FLA.Mingos, a Madeira Beach, Fla. specialty shop. “It’s getting too mainstream for me.”

Nonsense, says Featherstone.

“The flamingo is not a cult.” The more mainstream it gets, the happier he is. For in a storybook twist, the erstwhile creative genius is now a vice-president of Union, which does a $12 million business annually as a leading producer (there are two others) of flamingos in the world. It is flamingos, in part, that have financed a large Victorian house in Fitchburg, Mass., which he shares with his wife, Nancy (“Before we met, her parents had concrete cherubs on their lawn,” snipes Don. “Her folks

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acts F n u F Some

Over his years at Union Products, Featherstone sculpted over 750 different items

The plastic pink flamingo is the official city bird of Madison, Wisconsin.

A flock of flamingos is called a stand or a flamboyance.

Pink Flamingo Day was declared in 2007 by Dean Mazzaralla, the mayor of Leominster, MA to honour the work of Don Featherstone

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c i t s a l p The s i o g n i flam pink r e t t a ho l a e r a than . o g n i m fla 10

ingo s m o a l g n F i Flianmk P c i t s a l The P The passage below below is an excerpt from Jennifer Price’s recent essay “The Plastic Pink Flamingo: A Natural History.” The essay examines the popularity of the plastic pink flamingo in the 1950s.

When the pink flamingo splashed into the fifties market, it staked two major claims to boldness. First, it was a flamingo. Since the 1930s, vacationing Americans had been flocking to Florida and returning home with flamingo souvenirs. In the 1910s and 1920s, Miami Beach’s first grand hotel, the Flamingo, had made the bird synonymous with wealth and pizzazz. . . . [Later], developers built hundreds of more modest hotels to cater to an eager middle class served by new train lines—and in South Beach, especially, architects employed the playful Art Deco style, replete with bright pinks and flamingo motifs.

This was a little ironic, because Americans had hunted flamingos to extinction in Florida in the late 1800s, for plumes and meat. But no matter. In the 1950s, the new interstates would draw working-class tourists down, too. Back in New Jersey, the Union Products flamingo inscribed one’s lawn emphatically with Florida’s cachet of leisure and extravagance. The bird acquired an extra fillip of boldness, too, from the direction of Las Vegas—the flamboyant oasis of instant riches that the gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel had conjured from the desert in 1946 with his Flamingo Hotel. Anyone who has seen Las Vegas knows that a flamingo stands out in a desert even more strikingly than on a lawn.

In the 1950s, namesake Flamingo motels, restaurants, and lounges cropped up across the country like a line of semiotic sprouts.

And the flamingo was pink—a second and commensurate claim to boldness.

The plastics industries of the fifties favored flashy colors, which Tom Wolfe called “the new electrochemical pastels of the Florida littoral: tangerine, broiling magenta, livid pink, incarnadine, fuchsia demure, Congo ruby, methyl green.” The hues were forwardlooking rather than old-fashioned, just right for a generation, raised in the Depression, that was ready to celebrate its new affluence. And as Karal Ann Marling has written, the “sassy pinks” were “the hottest color of the decade.”

Washing machines, cars, and kitchen counters proliferated in passion pink, sunset pink, and Bermuda pink. In 1956, right after he signed his first recording contract, Elvis Presley bought a pink Cadillac.

Why, after all, call the birds “pink flamingos”— as if they could be blue or green?

The plastic flamingo is a hotter pink than a real flamingo, and even a real flamingo is brighter than anything else around it. There are five species, all of which feed in flocks on algae and invertebrates in saline and alkaline lakes in mostly warm habitats around the world. The people who have lived near these places have always singled out the flamingo as special.

Early Christians associated it with the red phoenix. In ancient Egypt, it symbolized the sun god Ra. In Mexico and the Caribbean, it remains a major motif in art, dance, and literature. No wonder that the subtropical species stood out so loudly when Americans in temperate New England reproduced it, brightened it, and sent it wading across an inland sea of grass.

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I went to work for Union Products right out of the school of the Worcester Art Museum in 1957 and

So Union Products is the only place you’ve ever worked?

There’s a little of both that went into it. I came to work for Union Products right out of art school.

The flamingo was one of my first projects. I sculpted it out of clay. But converting a sculpture to plastic forces you to be an engineer to some extent, to come to grips with the strengths and limitations of plastic. My pink flamingo would look a lot different if I’d made it out of bronze.

Yes, their journal is clever and a lot of fun, a great parody of the serious scientific journals in our line of work, psychometrics. And to think, they presented you the Ig Noble Award, for Art no less. That brings to mind my first question: We were a little taken aback to hear you described as “the inventor of the pink plastic flamingo.” We would prefer to think of you as “the artist who created the PPF.” Which is it?

DF: Oh, you know about those guys? They’re really nuts.

MS: Mr Featherstone, first let us congratulate you on your award of a 1996 Ig Noble Prize. [Author’s Note: Each year, in Cambridge, Mass, the editors of the Annals of Irreproducible Results present their Ig Noble Awards, in a parody of the Nobel awards ceremony.]

ck? u D y ot M W hy N

“Why the flamingo?” we asked. “Well, what I generally tell people is this,” he said. “We’re a military organization, so we had to have a mascot, I think it’s a federal law or something. All the real sexy animal mascots were taken already, you know, like the Tigers and Cheetahs and Cobras and Panthers and such.

And besides, we’re not really fighters anyway, heck, we’re psychologists. So the flamingo seemed like the perfect choice. After all, the flamingo is the universal symbol of good taste and psychometric excellence.”

An Interview with Don Featherstone.

By Monty Stanley

I M AG E S : A S EG M EN T F RO M A N E W

S ER I E S BY S T ER L I N G F I L M S , L I M I T ED

A B O U T A M ER I C A N P O P C U LT U R E .

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How’s that?

Oh, yes. Ducks, flamingos, penguins, gnomes, just about everything you could think of. We employ between 140 and 220 people, depending on the season. My first project was actually a duck.

You know, we probably sell more ducks than we do flamingos. But you flamingo people are a lot different from the duck people.

Lawn ornaments?

We manufacture a line of about 600-800 products, and I sculpted every one of them.

Tell me about your company.

[Laughing] No, no. Never touched one. Don’t plan to. I’m 61 years old and just don’t see the need. We do have computers all over the plant, though.

I take it you’re not a computer guy?

Oh, you’re the computer guy! Now I remember.

Rick said you’d call sometime this week.

We have a lot of readers who wonder whether you might be a surfer on the internet.

I’ve been there ever since. Last year I bought the firm from the former owners, who retired at ages 88 and 90.

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Right now, there are no pink flamingos in my front yard. They look silly and out of place in the snow.

Rather, I have two white flamingos - called Snomingos - and they’re kept company by a group of 17 penguins. In the summer, I generally keep 57 flamingos on the yard.

MS: How many PPFs (Plastic Pink Flamingos) do you have in your own yard?

I’m talking about how we molded the flamingo with bracing on the inside to receive the metal rods. That’s the secret of the graceful appearance.

Huh?

That was unacceptable to us. We saved money using the metal rods, but we also spent a lot of money on the sideaction--in-the-dye strictly to keep the body lines smooth and graceful.

What do you think about those newer model flamingos with the protruding leg braces to hold the metal rods?

My original model had wooden dowels for legs, but they were too expensive to make and plastic wasn’t strong enough, so we went with the metal rods. We once put out a model called the Flamingo Deluxe. They looked very natural, with nice wooden yellow legs, but they wouldn’t sell.

It’s almost like flamingo people think that the real birds have metal legs in their natural state.

D O N WO R K I N G I N T H E F L A M I N G O

FAC TO RY ( U N I O N P RO D U C T S I N C .)

CUTTING THE FL AMINGO OUT OF

PL ASTIC.

G O E S B AC K I N TO T H E M AC H I N E TO

THE

E XC E S S

PL ASITIC

M A K E M O R E F L A M I N G OS .

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Yes, I first realized that when the flamingo was coming up on its 30th anniversary. At the time, I wasn’t even aware that the 30-year point was coming up, and suddenly I was being invited to

You sound so unaffected, yet you must know that you are a true icon of ‘50s pop art.

I heard the other day that an antique store was selling one for several hundred dollars, but I can’t imagine paying that much.

I would think that would be a serious collector’s item these days.

The first ones didn’t have the feather detail molded in like they do now.

How did you know it was one of the first?

Oh, no. I did recently buy one of the first ones though when I found it at a yard sale nearby. I think I paid $2 for it.

Do you still have one from the first batch you molded?

I sculpted the first one of clay, which was then used to make a plaster cast. The plaster cast, in turn, was used to make aluminum dies to mold the plastic.

Tell me about your very first flamingo.

Why the metal legs? Art or engineering?

They’re durable, all right. They’re made out of the same plastic as the containers that they ship acid and glue in.

Back to flamingos. Our readers want to know the answer to some technical questions. Like what the heck are they made of? Something you found on an alien spacecraft in New Mexico?

Over a year, I probably average about one like that every day.

From the way you describe this correspondence, I take it that such letters are not all that unusual?

Oh, look here. I just got today’s mail. Look here.

There’s a bright pink envelope and - just a minute - now, confetti is pouring out of it. Not exactly confetti, it’s bright flamingo- and palm-shaped confetti, I guess. And there are snapshots and a thank-you letter.[At this point, he begins to describe a letter from an admirer in Newport Beach, California, who had apparently called him for consultation on how to plan a party she called a “Flamingo Fling” - we say “apparently” because he had no recollection of such a conversation. In the envelope were pictures: women dressed in pink, adorned in flamingo eyeglasses, earrings, and necklaces, drinking presumably adult beverages out of flamingo mugs through flamingo straws. In the background were flamingos with blonde wigs.]

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Do you know that there has been a plastic pink flamingo on display every year at the National Hardware Show for nearly 40 years now, virtually

And that’s when you realized the flamingo was here to stay?

There was an automobile dealer from Oklahoma who bought 700 flamingos from me and paid to have them express-mailed to him. He had been using them to get publicity. He and his employees would sneak out in the night and put them up as a flock in some conspicuous place, and it would make the news. Each morning the flamingos would mysteriously appear in a new location, no explanation, no signs or anything.

It got to where they had morning traffic reporters in their helicopters reporting on the latest location of the flock.

The car dealer’s plan was that, on the last day of his stunt, the flock would show up at his dealership. What he didn’t count on was that people would stop on the highways and steal them. And that’s why he suddenly had an urgent need to buy 700 of them from me. By the way, he did win a marketing award from General Motors for his efforts.

What kind of stories?

all kinds of parties in honor of my pink flamingo.

I didn’t go to many of them, but I realized something special was happening. I started paying attention and hearing more stories.

So you’re responsible for poor taste in the masses?

Throughout history, people have loved statuary. There’s plenty of evidence, in old paintings, in carvings, even in ancient hieroglyphics, that people have always loved to decorate their surroundings. In early America, for the longest time, there was no lawn ornamentation. Around the turn of the century, the Europeans started bringing over lawn ornaments in the form of bronze statuary. They were beautiful, and very popular, but few people could afford such things. Keep in mind that, before plastics, only rich people could afford to have poor taste.

Artistically, you mean?

I don’t want it to be just a joke. I’ll bet 90% of the people who buy them just really like them. They feel like I do, that an empty yard is like an empty coffee table, it cries out for something.

Talk about the flamingo from your perspective as an artist.

Yes. Flamingo Surprise does that nicely and with flair. Tastefully.

And now we have companies specializing in nighttime raids to fill people’s lawns with those flamingos, for a price.

unchanged? How many things can you say that about?

H A N D PA I N T I N G A N D PAC K AG I N G

O F T H E F L A M I N G OS .

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Well, good luck with it. Mr Featherstone, it’s been great of you to give us this interview. Our readers will love it.

I really like how my flamingo looks - it’s very graceful. But I can’t help but wonder, why not my duck? Maybe some day it’ll take off like the flamingo did.

What’s next for you?

I did something that people enjoyed, something that amused people. That’s so much more satisfying than, say, designing something destructive like the atom bomb. And I’ll tell you something about people who put out flamingos: They’re friendlier than most people. Remember, they don’t do it for themselves, they’re doing it to entertain you.

How do you want to be remembered?

You know, my own neighbors used to hate my flamingos; complained about them all the time.

Then they moved to Florida, and the first thing they say when they write us a letter is how much they miss the flamingos and would I please send them some.

L AWN KITSCH

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THERE ARE MORE PL ASTIC PINK FL AMINGOS IN AMERICA THAN REAL ONES.

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s a w “I o t n a w e dr s t n i r p l a c i p tro d n i m e r that s ’ n o D f o me ” . o g n i m fla 26

tfits u O m o ust 600 C A married couple who have dressed alike every day for 33 years say it is the clearest way of showing that ‘we’re together.’ Donald Featherstone and his wife Nancy, told The Sun that they even phone each other when they are not together to ensure that their style is in sync. Luckily the large Victorian home that they share in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, has enough closet space to house their unique fashion collection which includes 600 custom-made outfits and dozens of identical his and hers accessories.

Mr Featherstone, 77, usually wears bold print shirts, while his wife of 36 years dons dresses cut from the same cloth. Recalling the first time they experimented with the look-alike concept, Mrs Featherstone, 60, said, “I made Don the same shirt I was wearing. We’ve dressed alike ever since. We love it.”

The former dressmaker, who started making her own clothes aged 12, has sewn hundreds of ensembles in an array of eye-catching fabrics over the years. She said she is often drawn to tropical prints that remind her of her husband’s famous molded bird, which was manufactured by Union Products and first hit the market in 1958.

Some standout twinsets include Chesterfield coats topped with bowler hats, brown wool suits and loud Christmas-colored Hawaiian shirts. Their dog Smokey also boasts a wardrobe of his own, and they like to dress him up for special occasions. The couple’s love story started in August 1975 when they met at a hardware convention in Chicago.

That day Mr Featherstone made up his mind that ‘someday’ he would marry Nancy - and a year later, on July 23, he did.

Mrs Featherstone said that when she met her husband he was ‘very prim and proper’ and would only wear long-sleeved shirts, a tie

and a suit. But following her mother’s advice, she started jazzing up his style by making him more colorful outfits. “I made Don the same shirt I was wearing. We’ve dressed alike ever since. We love it”

She first had the idea to make two garments after she remembered a tradition at Jennings Junior High School in Missouri, where couples wore matching shirts to the end-of-year dance. It was in 1977 that the Featherstones first slipped into the same looks, a pair of polyester ‘play shirts’. Then on Easter Sunday of the same year Mr Featherstone stepped out in slacks, a sport coat and pink silky shirt while his wife donned a pink, silky dress. Their dressing-up habit soon became a full-blown obsession and in 1980 they went full-time.

Today, with so many options to choose from they say that they base their outfits on whoever gets to the closet first. Mrs Featherstone, told the New York Times in 1997 that neighbors, friends and relatives always ask ‘why’ they do it. ‘I recall Donald saying that he would still feel a little flutter of new love every time he saw Nancy’ She replied: ‘First and foremost, it’s fun! We like it! But it’s also the clearest sign we can give that we’re together.

For Donald and me, that’s our deal.’ Meanwhile her husband explained in Kate Schermerhorn’s

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2011 documentary After Happily Ever After, which explored the secret to wedded success: ‘We are always together, and that’s the only way we like to be.’

After working with the Featherstones Ms Schermerhorn described their bond as inspiring. She told MailOnline: ‘They definitely seemed very in love and in fact, told me that they couldn’t remember the last time they had left the house separately.

‘I recall Donald saying that when they were in the supermarket together he would still feel a little flutter of new love every time he looked down the aisle and saw Nancy.’

The Featherstones aren’t the first two people to show they’re together through matching outfits: Husband and wife Mel and Joey Schwanke from a small city outside Omaha, Nebraska, have dressed alike for more than 35 years and never leave the house unless they are dressed in the same pattern. ‘We don’t dare go somewhere without having matching outfits,’ Mr Schwanke told KETV. ‘Every day, my tie matches her dress.’

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1 9 9 6 I G N O B EL P R I Z E W I N N ER A N D C R E ATO R O F T H E P L A S T I C P I N K F L A M I N G O L AW N O R N A M EN T, P OS E S W I T H H I S N A N C Y W H I L E B EI N G H O N O R ED A S A PA S T R EC I P I EN T D U R I N G A P ER F O R M A N C E AT T H E I G N O B EL P R I Z E C ER EM O N Y AT H A RVA R D U N I V ER S I T Y, I N C A M B R I D G E , M A S S . , S EP T. 2 0 , 2 0 1 2 . T H E I G N O B EL P R I Z E I S A N AWA R D H A N D ED O U T BY T H E A N N A L S O F I M P RO B A B L E R E S E A RC H M AG A Z I N E F O R S I L LY S O U N D I N G S C I EN T I F I C D I S COV ER I E S T H AT O F T EN H AV E S U R P R I S I N G LY P R AC T I C A L A P P L I C AT I O N S .

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d i d “I t a h t g n i h t some , d e y o j n e e l p o e p t a h t g n i h t some � . e l p o e p d e s u am ne n o D —

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Index

WHY NOT MY DUCK?

LAWN A-MERCY!

tiny.cc/1ong2w

tiny.cc/fumg2w

By Monty Stanley

By David Van Biema

INTERVIEW VIDEO

600 CUSTOM OUTFITS

tiny.cc/0tng2w

tiny.cc/ncog2w

By Sterling Films

By Sadie Whitelocks

PINK PLASTIC FLAMINGO

LAWN KITSCH tiny.cc/gxqg2w tiny.cc/67ng2w

By Jennifer Price

tiny.cc/zapg2w

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T P

H I

E N

K

P L A S T I C FLAMINGO

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