The pink flamingos are frozen, each poised forever on a single slender leg.
Quiet spreads softly across the shiny green lawn as you move up the bricked walk, toward the front door of the house on a Kodachrome day.
Suddenly, over by the impatiens, the earth shivers.
A flower pot rises and a small animal comes up out of the ground, wearing the pot the way a lady wears a hat. It might be a rabbit or a raccoon, a squirrel, a skunk, a chipmunk or a gopher.
It’s talking, telling you that the resident is out back or that all packages should be delivered next door. Maybe it invites you to leave a message, so the resident knows that you stopped by or dropped off a package.
This is Lawn Buddy: America’s first animated lawn ornament, according to the patent folks. It works like an answering machine.
And the animated critter promises to put a new wrinkle in the apron of green out front. The promoters are already lining up, ready to make this the next gotta-have-it for homeowners.
“Used to be, people had little gnomes in the garden. Now, they’ll have Lawn Buddies,” said Bob Killian of Philadelphia, whose son invented the thing, which is “very realistic” plastic, 4 1/2 inches wide and 5 inches tall.
“Everybody needs a buddy,” son Bill said, “and it’ll kind of be the buddy system.”
Raucous laughter rolled through the Killians’ home as father and son talked about the project. The elder Killian, a ceramist, is his son’s business manager. The younger is a tree specialist.
They are working out a contract with a manufacturer, and they expect to have the product on the shelves by next spring. Right now, they figure it’ll go for $29.95.
In the meantime, Lawn Buddy is getting attention.
It took the gold medal in the garden and home-novelties division at the 12th Inpex inventors’ show in Pittsburgh in May. Thirty countries were represented at the show, which is considered a premier event for small-time inventors and featured 1,500 inventions.
Business Week magazine referred to the Lawn Buddy in a May issue, and a mention in Popular Mechanics is expected. In June, a crew from the BBC children’s show “It’ll Never Work” arrived to film a segment.
The Killians have the number to the private line of a bigwig at the Home Shopping Network. She wants an exclusive, before the product hits store shelves, the men said.
“This is amazing, from Day One, how it’s taken off,” the younger man said. Out of the “hundreds and hundreds of people” who’ve heard about Lawn Buddy, only one didn’t like the idea, he said.
“That was my aunt–but she’s 86. She went `ehhhhh?’ “
If you had to dream up a guy to dream up Lawn Buddy, it would be Bill Killian. He got the idea for the talking lawn ornament about three years ago, after talking to a squirrel.
After several trips to a client’s house, only to find her not home, and thwarted in his attempts to leave notes for her, he turned to the squirrel as he left her place one last time.
“YOU tell her I was here,” he growled. “And that’s really how it took off.”
Killian, 36, is working on two other inventions he won’t talk about–one is in the medical field and one has to do with trees. He would discuss his other hobby, though.
Chainsaw carving.
“A tree trunk spoke to him one day and said, `I could be an owl,’ ” the father said. “I said, `Yes, you can,’ ” the younger man said. The pair of them roared.
Bill Killian fashions the characters from trees, then places them around his yard, captivating passersby.
“I did have a guy stop and give me $5. I said, `What’s that for?’ He thought it was a miniature golf course.”
True or false?
Who knows.
Killian’s philosophy is, “People will buy anything, especially if it makes you laugh.”
In one frenzied Christmas season, he reminds us, the American public spent money on rocks, just because somebody called them pets.
Hence, the creator’s hopes for his most promising invention, which unlike Pet Rocks has a calling.
Bill Killian is one of three children. His two sisters are creative, their father said. “But nothing ever talks to them out of the ground.”
“He’s always had a vivid imagination,” his mother, Florence, said. Ideas pop out constantly.
“Nobody ever listens,” Bill Killian said. “He’ll say, `I’ve got a great idea,’ and somebody will respond, `Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ “
But Lawn Buddy was different. His dad listened, and the two of them ended up in a lawyer’s office.
“This patent attorney just went nuts. `This is how we can do it.’ Suddenly, it was `we,’ ” Bill Killian said.
Is wealth near?
The men answered at the same time: “Sure,” said Dad. “Nah,” said son. Then, the younger one reconsidered.
“It is possible.”
