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.
The flamingos inspired the film that launched John Waters‘s directorial career: Pink Flamingos. The flamingos also inspired the birth of several businesses that supply flamingos en mass, as surprise visitors to the lawn of a beloved or despised neighbor.
Don Featherstone was a happy, kind, and thoughtfully imaginative man, who became famous for his goofiest, tackiest creation. It was “goofiest” and “tackiest” by Don’s own reckoning — he was a richly talented artist, but felt that, given the fame and financial security the flamingo brought him, he ought to publicly act as if he were interested only in making happy goofy, plastic art. In 2012, Abigail Tucker wrote a history of the flamingo’s effect on the world, in Smithsonian magazine, with the headline “The Tacky History of the Pink Flamingo.”
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