The scant flock of plastic lawn flamingos in Liberta Rogers’ front yard hardly gives away her deep, dark, flamingo secret.
Only those invited to step inside Rogers’ immaculate mobile home in Horseshoe Cove, near the corner of State Road 70 and Caruso Road, know the real truth.
Liberta Rogers’ life has completely gone to the birds, er, flamingos.
Rogers, 77, who summers in Lawton, Mich., spends her winters with 500 flamingos of all shapes and sizes.
There are 50 on her fridge, attached with magnets.
There are flamingos with particular skills for the kitchen, bathroom, dining room and living room.
There’s a flamingo candy dish, a flamingo wine bottle holder, a flamingo soap dispenser, a flamingo dish pad holder, a flamingo umbrella, a flamingo clock and a flamingo toilet seat cover.
There’s a flamingo nail clipper and toothbrush.
There’s a flamingo table and a sofa filled with 50 soft stuffed flamingos, which Rogers loves to submerge into, like a dish of comfort food.
There are flamingo earrings and clothing for her body with flamingos doing crazy things, like turning pink in the sunlight.
For her 75th birthday, Rogers had a flamingo tattooed on her right arm.
There are flamingo bed throws, pillows and even a flamingo stapler and tape dispenser, which she purchased at Crowder Brothers’ Ace Hardware.
Friends drop off flamingos and make them for her.
“I love the toilet seat cover and rug, and it was dropped off at my door without a note,” Rogers said. “I’d love to thank them but they are enjoying their secret.”
Friends say what makes Rogers’ collection unique is not that there are so many flamingos, but that they all have their own niche.
“The thing you are struck by is that every flamingo seems to belong,” said neighbor Fani Rogers, who is not related to Liberta. “It’s the way she designed the flamingos into her home that is wonderful. Liberta is an artist.”
Rogers agrees that although people usually yell out, “Wow!” upon entering her home, they never come away with the notion that chaps in white coats and a net are needed to rescue her from flamingo obsession.
The king of the house seems to be a large, floppy, “raggedy” flamingo made of silky material that someone found in a garage sale. He resides on a front room sofa.
“He’s unique,” Rogers said, stroking the legs made out of strips of silky material.
Rogers’ fascination began in 1996. That’s when she was visiting her sister, Betty, in Tampa, about a year before she would become a Florida/Michigan snowbird.
Rogers saw a flamingo thermometer stuck on Betty’s refrigerator.
All it took was one glance and Rogers found herself unable to resist the long-necked birds, famous for their pink color and their graceful one-footed stance in the water.
“I thought, ‘That is a cute little bird,’ ” Rogers said. “I think I asked Betty, ‘Could I have that?’”
It all grew from there, Rogers said.
The widow of the late Robert Rogers, who was a cherry and asparagus grower in Michigan for 35 years, Rogers has a sense of humor about her birds.
“I don’t talk to them, at least not this year,” Rogers said. “I simply love them. They don’t eat. None are misbehaved. I enjoy them so much. They are unique. They are the only pink bird I know.”
Rogers says she has now reached the saturation point. She can’t fit another flamingo in her home. Yet, seconds later she blurts out, “But if anyone has an orphan flamingo that needs a home, call me.”
Richard Dymond, Herald reporter, can be reached at 708-7917.
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