What's Going On with Flamingos in Parma, Ohio?
Parma, Ohio, is an 80,000-person suburb located in Cleveland’s shadow, and it just made the plastic flamingo its official mascot.
To the untrained eye, this makes no sense. Parma, Ohio, is not where Don Featherstone, the inventor of the plastic pink flamingo, was from - that’s Worcester, Massachusetts. It’s also not Leominster, Massachusetts, where Featherstone invented the ornament while working at Union Products. Parma is not even Madison, Wisconsin, where student pranksters covered the main field in the center of the University of Wisconsin’s campus with more than 1,000 plastic pink flamingos in 1979, forever linking the town and school with the inanimate version of the fabulous fowl.
Parma’s flamingo story is even more convoluted.
In the 1960s, people watched late-night television, including local late-night television (I know, I couldn’t believe it either). In the Cleveland area, Ernie Anderson’s Shock Theater became a very popular option for late-nighters. During his run as the show’s frontman from 1963 to 1966, Anderson had the eyeballs of Northeast Ohio.
A common theme of the show was a character called “Ghoulardi.” One of Ghoulardi’s most popular shticks included ripping on Parma with no remorse. The common tropes of his attacks on the ethnically Eastern European, working-class town included white socks, polka music, and lawns littered with plastic pink flamingos. Those outside of Parma loved it. The town and its mayor did not.
A lot can change in 50 years. Now, Parma has multiple metal flamingo statues within its limits, imagery and plastic renditions of the bird can be found across town, and the plastic flamingo is now officially its mascot. Talk about embracing the hate.
“You’ll see on social media folks picking on Parma, it’s like they’re picking on your little brother,” Parma Mayor Tim DeGeeter told Cleveland.com on Oct. 7. “We love our city. We love the folks in it. And what better symbol than a pink flamingo to show pride in your front yard.”
This is not the first time we have featured Parma and its flamingo connection on this site. In June 2024, we wrote about a failed theft attempt of the first flamingo statue in Parma, which produced quite the story. What we failed to report - but just learned thanks to the city’s recent announcement - is that a successful theft of the second statue occurred in June of this year, about a month after it was unveiled. It only took police a handful of days to identify the suspects, who committed the crime on camera.
“I don’t think they realized the severity of what they had done,” Parma Deputy Police Chief Kevin Riley said to Cleveland.com in June. “They didn’t realize the significance of it -- but afterward they did. They cooperated and brought the flamingo back to us Monday evening, so we have it back in here under safekeeping.”
A third flamingo statue is under construction, further cementing Parma’s affinity for the fabulous fowl. Its reveal should give us the answer to the ultimate, burning question: is there a flamingo statue in Parma that people won’t steal?
