The Whirligig Man : Spinners Are His Passion and He Churns Out Flocks of Them
On windy days, Gene O’Brien’s festive front yard in Rosemead might remind people of a circus calliope. Or Flag Day on the deck of a World War II aircraft carrier.
Propellers whiz, carousels creak into motion, birds twirl, and O’Brien’s prized zinnias, fat ones in a variety of colors, bob like pennants.
That’s when O’Brien, a rumpled man with a puckish smile and a wry, self-deprecating humor, likes to stand out on the front porch of the little square house with the stuccoed walls and take it all in.
“If it wasn’t for something like this,” he says, “I’d go batty. It’s really been a savior for me.”
In the last year, O’Brien has converted his house into a kind of whirligig workshop, with most of its output ending up on the lawn. His scroll saw sits on a table in the cluttered living room. A rented copying machine, for shrinking or magnifying patterns, is nearby. Another power saw, for making straight cuts, stands in the middle of the garage. Works in progress are propped against a bedroom wall or laid out on the floor in the game room. Bits of plexiglass are everywhere.
“It’s kind of soothing,” he says of his hobby.
O’Brien got into whirligigs--”idiot’s delight,” he says with a guffaw--about four years ago. But it wasn’t until last year, after his wife of 32 years died, that he became consumed by it.
“I wanted to get into something to take my mind off of her,” says O’Brien, 68, a retired produce manager for Vons markets.
Now he turns them out in flocks. Plastic cardinals and blue jays, wings churning, circle a winged pin-up girl. Reindeer revolve around a pair of snowmen. Coyotes and butterflies, on posts extended from the edge of the roof, whirl madly in the breeze.
The molded propellers seem to offer endless possibilities. “You can put a whirligig on anything,” O’Brien says, pointing at a swan with twirling propellers. “That swan used to be a planter.”
The problem is that O’Brien’s lawn is small. “I keep running out of space,” he says. He’s taken to giving the whirligigs to neighbors and passers-by. Already, the roof antennas of three of his neighbors are festooned with O’Brien-crafted whirligigs.
People passing through the neighborhood often slow their cars at the sight of the brightly decorated house. “There’s one now,” says O’Brien of a woman motorist who has pulled over across the street to study the house.
But along Olmby Street, the whirligig man is just one of the neighbors--one with a wide streak of generosity.
The neighborhood is a friendly sort of place, with tidy houses and folks who share recipes and the bounty of back-yard gardens. “Somebody told me to plant four zucchini plants,” says O’Brien’s neighbor Gene Boyd, shrugging hopelessly. “Now I’ve been keeping the whole neighborhood in zucchinis for months.”
Surprisingly, O’Brien says, it’s women--”the middle-aged ladies”--who most admire his work. “They’re the ones who ooh and aah,” he says. “I haven’t seen any kid like it yet. They could care less.”
“Gene, you know they like it,” Boyd interrupts. “They don’t bother it. If they didn’t like it, they’d tear it down.”
O’Brien scoffs and settles deeper into his sofa. “It’s all play,” he says with breezy melancholy. “That’s all I do. Get up and play and eat.”
Things were going splendidly before his wife died last year, O’Brien says. She had retired from her job as a bookkeeper; the house was paid off, and the couple kept busy. “We went to Tahiti, clear down to Acapulco and up to Seattle several times,” he says. “We’d make a short trip to Las Vegas every third month or so.”
But Marian O’Brien suffered a stroke early last year. “She just went downhill real fast,” he says. She died in August. “I miss her something awful.”
O’Brien, who was born in Kansas but settled in California in 1946 after a stint in the Coast Guard, was just learning how to make the colorful decorations. At first he used wood, working from plans bought through crafts catalogues. “Marian had some good suggestions,” he says.
