Don Featherstone of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, passed away Monday morning, a victim of Lewy body disease. A couple of years ago, we featured Featherstone and his wife Nancy, who wore matching outfits every day for the last 37 years of their marriage. But Featherstone is best remembered as the man who invented the plastic pink lawn flamingo.
Don created the flamingo when he was freshly graduated from art school, and newly employed at a plastics factory. One of his first assignments was to create three-dimensional plastic lawn ornaments (up to that time, most plastic lawn ornaments were more or less flat). The flamingo was one of his earliest efforts for the factory.
Eventually he became president of the company. After Don retired, dire things were done, by his successor, to the flamingo, triggering a worldwide protest, which eventually led to a more or less happy rallying of the forces of Good, and a restoration of the plastic pink flamingo’s status. In 2011, the flamingo attained new heights, when the Disney movie Gnomeo and Juliet featured a plastic pink lawn ornament named “Featherstone”. Don and Nancy were feted at the film’s premiere.
Featherstone was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in art for his creation in 1996, and later appeared in several of the Ig Nobel ceremonies. Don Featherstone was 79. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Harbor House Flamingo Festival)