Did you know that Leominster's mayor created a national holiday?

Called “Pink Plastic Flamingo Day," this holiday honors the pink plastic flamingo, which was invented in a plastic factory in Leominster in the late 1950s.

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LEOMINSTER —Mayor Dean Mazzarella put Leominster on the map by founding a national holiday that pays tribute to the inventor of those ubiquitous pink plastic lawn flamingos.

In 2007, Mazzarella founded “Pink Plastic Flamingo Day,” a national holiday celebrated every June 23. The holiday was established to honor Don Featherstone, the man who invented the very first plastic flamingo in 1957 while working for Union Products plastic factory in Leominster. Once dubbed “Comb City” for it’s mass production of plastic combs, the city of Leominster was a plastics manufacturing hub during the first half of the 20th Century.

Union Products manufactured pink plastic flamingos in Leominster until 2006, when the company sold the copyright to them. Featherstone passed away nine years later in 2015, on June 22, just one day before Pink Flamingo Day.