TodayPranksters put flamingos on lawns
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Bill and Eileen Karlak and their neighbor Cletus Benjamin, right, all of Green Ridge Village, inspect the flamingos that “mysteriously” appeared on their lawns.(Jason Malmont/The Sentinel)
When Bill and Eileen Karlak spotted two flamingos in their Green Ridge Village yard the week after Thanksgiving, it sparked a rash of flamingo sightings that have yet to stop.
While no one is owning up to the initial flamingo placement, the Karlaks, who live at Oak Circle in the West Pennsboro Township retirement community, suspect friends Cletus Benjamin and John Bartko.
“It’s had a checkered history,” Bartko says of the larger flamingo.
It mysteriously moved to the mail boxes at Oak Circle, then to the street sign and “then on a wide, circuitous route,” Bartko says. “It ended up in a tree one time.”
Along the way, it’s brought smiles and laughter.
“We’ve livened up the place,” Bill Karlak says.
Landed at health center
Oak Circle resident Palmer Quarles was hospitalized just before Christmas and returned for convalescence to Swaim Health Center at Green Ridge. The flamingo mysteriously appeared in the courtyard at Swaim, where Quarles saw it when he looked out the window in the morning.
“It really got a lot of laughs up there,” Benjamin says.
When the medium-sized flamingo wound up in Mary Walton’s yard, she knitted a sweater for it. Although that flamingo disappeared, sweater and all, it didn’t stop the fun.
“When another one ended up in her yard, she knitted pants for it,” Eileen Karlak says.
At Christmas time, a small flamingo appeared, nativity-style, in a basket of straw. And a sleigh filled with coal, pulled by two flamingos, appeared in the Karlaks’ yard.
‘Caught’ with bird
Bill Karlak was caught pink-handed one night. He drove with a flamingo to the Bartkos’ home with his headlights out, nearly striking a telephone pole along the way, he says. As he crept through the dark across the Bartkos’ lawn, security lights blazed to life.
“It was like a football field,” he says.
Marketing director Christine Chubb is new to Green Ridge.
“I’ve only been here for five weeks,” she says. “That was my initiation to the Karlaks and the Benjamins. The buzz was over the flamingos.”
Residents would ask her if she knew where the flamingos were.
“They were having such a good time with it,” she says.
Anything that keeps the residents youthful is fine by Green Ridge, she adds.
When someone posted a flaming pink sign that renamed the circle “Flamingo Circle,” Bill Karlak showed where his daughter got the skills that made her a federal agent.
Karlak began by asking to borrow string from his neighbors. When that didn’t match string used in the sign, he took a piece of wood and matched it to the trim in the Bartkos’ house. Busted.
The flamingos even inspired a Christmas gift from Benjamin’s daughter, who lives in Minneapolis.
“I’m sponsoring a flamingo at the Minneapolis Zoo,” he says.
And a tiny flamingo has appeared at the model train layout created by the Green Spring and Big Spring Railroad club. It’s even part of a scavenger hunt that asks visitors to locate various items in the layout.
Residents will sometimes tell them the flamingos need to go to a certain residence and others ask when the flamingos will visit them, Benjamin says.
“It’s been a lot of laughs,” he says. “A lot of people in town don’t realize what the cottages and lodges are like. They think you’re from ‘the home.’ It’s a lot livelier than ‘the home.’”
