Submitted photo: Flamingos are, beginning at left, in pink shirt Paula Brownell, Margy Wood, Cynthia Weiss, Ruth Bullock, Carol Peterson and Mary Schultz, and "honorary Flamingos" Gordon Fish and Dean Bowden, who were there to represent their wives, the late Dorothy Hill Fish and Adele Bowden.

Do you know the charming, true story of the swallows of San Juan Capistrano?

Each year, on St. Joseph’s Day, March 19, they return to the old mission church in San Juan Capistrano located on the southern California coast.

Their flight comes from their winter nesting grounds 6000 miles away in Argentina. Each fall around October 23, the feast day of San Juan Capistrano, they leave on their southerly migration.

We bet you don’t know though, that the flamingos of Webster City returned recently after an absence of many years. There’s more to that story. Quite a bit more.

The flamingos are a group of Webster City ladies who’ve been friends for more than 40 years.

They can’t quite agree when the group first began meeting, but for many years they met every Wednesday evening.

Flamingo Ruth Bullock, now of Owatonna, Minnesota, estimates they began meeting in 1983.

“I was newly married at the time and was notified by my husband he would never be home Wednesday evenings. It was golf in the summer and pool and cards at other times of the year,” she said.

That’s how Wednesday nights became “flamingo night,” a day of the week reserved for rotating meetings between each other’s homes. What was the agenda for a typical flamingo flocking event? Adult refreshments were a given, but the group’s main focus was support, whenever, and wherever, it was needed.

“This was always a support group,” commented Paula Brownell.

Made up of teachers, business women, a librarian, and a retail store owner, the flamingos were busy raising families and pursuing careers in the 1980s and 1990s here in Webster City. But they always found time to support fellow flamingos going through a rough patch, or celebrating one of life’s minor victories.

“It was always a girl’s get-together,” women being there for other women,” said Brownell.

But that name? Why flamingos?

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it wasn’t unusual to wake up and find a flock of pink plastic flamingos on your lawn in Webster City. How this curious custom began and who was behind it, is lost to local history.

But Brownell admitted “I moved a lot of flamingos around in those years.”

It wasn’t confined to Webster City, either. It may have originated in Clear Lake, where a church youth group hit on the idea of soliciting donations for “flamingo removal service.” When it was revealed the church kids had placed the birds on the lawns, and were using the flamingo removal fees to support their activities, the complaints evaporated.

Even those who weren’t thrilled to wake up to flamingos on their lawn had to agree that it was better than toilet paper.

Overcoming her innate shyness, Bullock said, “I hated those damned plastic flamingos, but that’s where we got our name.”

This flamingo reunion saw them gathering not on lawns, but at The Grid Iron and Seneca Street Saloon to celebrate old friendships and Webster City memories.

Flamingo Carol Peterson, now of Des Moines, spoke of one of the group’s cherished traditions.

“Each year we write down predictions and put them in a jar. At our next get-together, we read them aloud, to see how accurate we were.”

This year, the group correctly predicted Michigan-based flamingo Cynthia Weiss would finally publish her book. The book, which has taken 11 years of work, is about Gulliver Lake and the Old Deerfield Resort/Inn in Gulliver.

Gulliver is a small town of 747 residents in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Weiss’ books are sold at the gift shop of the Seul Choix Pointe lighthouse in Gulliver.

The flamingos decided to visit their ancestral home for this year’s flamboyance. A flamboyance is a gathering of flamingos due to the bird’s colorful plumage. In other years, they’ve met in Iowa City, Iowa San Diego, California, Chicago, Illinois, Portland, Oregon and Gulliver, Michigan.

But all those memories, all that support that bonded the flamingos together, began right here in Webster City.

In so many ways, the most special place of all.