Plastic Pink Flamingo Factory Closes

Leominster, Massachusetts, was home to Union Products, Inc. up until Wednesday, when the company closed its doors. Normally, this journal views such events as sad, disrupting workers’ lives as they do. However, this case is exceptional. Union Products manufactured the plastic pink flamingos that have stained American culture since the 1950s, and the shuttering of the factory might mean an end to these abominations.

Flamingos are, in their natural state, rather amazing creatures. Rendered in plastic resin and spray painted a color that doesn’t really occur in nature, the only thing amazing is that anyone would pay $10 for a pair. The need to have them stand on one’s lawn in suburbia, as if the quarter acre lot were really part of the Florida wetlands, remains a mystery. Rather like disco music, they are a bad idea made worse by popularity, the awfulness of which is magnified by nostalgia.

Leominster native Don Featherstone designed these birds in 1957 never having seen them in person. He worked, he said, from the pages of National Geographic. He had been an art student before Union Products hired him to expand its line of garden ornaments (why are such things needed? Surely God’s work is adequate ornamentation.). Before Mr. Featherstone, Union only offered 2-dimensional animals. That may sum up the Eisenhower years, when pink flamingos could be viewed as an improvement.

Mr. Featherstone, though, isn’t the villain here. He produced something the public wanted, so clearly the public is at fault. Taste is not distributed evenly, and worse, it seems that it is often bestowed in an inverse proportion to one’s wealth -- e.g., Donald Trump and his casinos. Eventually, the kids who grew up with these damned things in the yards realized that they were hideous. John Waters’ film “Pink Flamingos,” a study in bad taste in the US, said it best – it included a graffito “free Tex Watson,” in true 1970s counter-culture style. Mr. Watson was one of Charles Manson’s henchmen, who deserved no freedom at all.

Regrettably, the 1980s and 1990s were the age of irony, the poor man’s substitute for wit. The pink flamingo became a symbol of the times. “I know it’s tacky” became an excuse for showing off tackiness. In small doses, that may be acceptable; otherwise, those with that attitude become accomplices in vulgar yuckiness.

Union Products is in negotiations with rival lawn ornament manufacturers to sell off Mr. Featherstone’s molds. These discussions may or may not come to fruition. The best hope to kill these things off forever is the price of oil, from which the plastic resins are made. If there’s no profit in them, they will perish. May Saudi Arabia succeed where art appreciation classes have failed.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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