Don Featherstone: meet the man who designed the iconic pink flamingo (and his gravestone adorned with his most famous creation!)

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3 weeks ago Nathan

Don Featherstone graduated from Worcester Art Museum’s art school in 1957, and then began working for Union Products, Inc. in Leominster, Massachusetts designing 3D plastic animals.
Over his 43-year illustrous career, he created over 750 different plastic lawn ornaments, but none were as popular as the pink flamingo, his second assignment, first released in 1957.
Immediately it became popular due the color pink and the flamingo’s promise of an endless summer and, as live flamingos were not readily available in New England, he reportedly relied on National Geographic photos to create the design for his creature. It took about two weeks to model both halves of the bird, brought into the third dimension by then-revolutionary injection-mold technology.
When they first hit stores, the birds cost $2.76 a pair and were an immediate hit in working-class subdivisions from the Redwood Forest to the Gulfstream waters.
The decorations became so popular that in 1987, Featherstone Originals included a mold of Don’s signature to set it apart from other generic versions.

However, the 1960s were a decade of backlash against conformity, false experience, and all things Parental including lawn décor.
Hippies rallied against the plastics industry, cultural critics chastised all things un-natural, and home and garden magazines pleaded with people to abandon the gnomes, lawn jockeys and, not by chance, flamingos in favor of elegant and, above all, more natural yard décor.
By 1970, even most popular shops had stopped selling the pink flamingo, replacing the gaping hole in their garden department with natural-looking fountains and rocks.
Despite some homeowner’s associations banning the plastic pink flamingo, its popularity has endured.
In the ‘70s the pink flamingo had become so un-cool, it was cool again, but this time as a self-conscious symbol of rebellion, outrageousness and all things Bad Taste. For example, gay bars used them as mascots, transvestites sported them on earrings and platform pumps, and in 1979, students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison even planted 1008 of the birds in the grass in front of the dean’s office, earning them, together with the pink creatures, a place in Wisconsin’s State Historical Society.

In 2009 the Madison, Wisconsin city council named it the city’s official bird, in honor of the students’ 1979 prank. Also the 1972 John Waters film Pink Flamingos obviously took its name from the kitschy creation, and the 2011 Disney animated film Gnomeo & Juliet featured a pink flamingo character “Featherstone” in Don’s honor.
As a result, in 1996 his creator received an Ig Nobel Prize for Art from Improbable Research for his “ornamentally evolutionary invention, the plastic pink flamingo.”
Don and his wife Nancy attended the induction ceremony at Harvard wearing matching outfits and, apparently, the Featherstones wore matching outfits every day for 35 years!
Either way, Don Featherstone died in 2015 at the age of 79, and he was buried in South Berlin Cemetery in a family plot.
His gravestone includes seven flamingoes etched into the stone as well as the epitaph “Original creator of the pink plastic flamingo.”