Constable: From Playboy bunny to queen of lawn goose fashion

Researching online for a column about suburbanites who dress up concrete lawn geese to match the season, the first hit connects me to Nancy Gardner, Class of 1968 Kaneland High School graduate, former Playboy bunny and the queen of lawn goose fashion.

“At one point, I had six designers,” says Gardner, 68, whose Lawn Goose Designs international internet business has been selling an assortment of concrete lawn geese and goslings, and hundreds of outfits for them, for the past 25 years.

Her cheapest costume — a summery barbecue chef outfit with a red-and-white checked apron, a white chef hat and cooking utensils to hang around a goose's neck — sells for $21.79. Her most expensive outfit — an elaborate Elvis jumpsuit with collar and bell-bottoms, flashy red cape with trim, wig and stylish glasses — sells for $42.79. In between are outfits listed alphabetically from Amish Lady goose to the wintry Wool Coat goose, which she has sold to customers as far away as England, Scotland and Australia.

The maven of folksy goose outfits used to wear a costume of her own — a strapless bodysuit complete with bunny ears and a fluffy tail.

”I ended up being a Playboy bunny at the original club while I was going to school,” says Gardner, who was studying at the famous Patricia Stevens Modeling School in Chicago when she interviewed with Keith Hefner, brother of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who offered her a job working in the Playboy Club just a few blocks from her school.

“The very first night, I'll never forget. You have to wear high-heels, and my feet hurt so bad, I went into the bathroom and soaked my feet in cold water in the sink,” remembers Gardner, who was 18 at the time. She managed to work her way into a position where she could go barefoot.

“I got to work the piano bar and I loved to dance, so I got to dance on the piano,” she says.

Her school was famous for training airline stewardesses and beauty contestants, and her job gave her a chance to rub elbows with celebrities, but Gardner shunned the jet-set life.

“I was invited to Bill Cosby's birthday party,” Gardner says, explaining how she opted instead to visit her boyfriend at Northern Illinois University and how that might have been a good thing in hindsight.

Gardner would go on to get married at age 19 to a man she'd later divorce, and to be a contestant in a Miss Photo Flash Pageant before leaving the world of modeling. She worked as a long-distance telephone operator, plugging cords into a manual switchboard to make connections. She moved to the corporate world, where she worked in management, and ended up in Parker, Colorado.

Through it all, she held on to her Midwestern roots.

“My grandmother taught me how to sew when I was 6,” says Gardner, who went to grade school in Plano before her family moved to Aurora. As a high school student, Gardner sewed many of her own clothes, including a gown she wore for her modeling portfolio. She made her first goose costume in the early 1990s for a cousin who lived in Indianapolis. “It's a Midwest thing,” Gardner says. “In Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, everybody's got a goose.”

She bought her own gooses and made a variety of outfits, once dressing a dozen geese in front of her house. “We definitely stopped traffic that day,” Gardner remembers.

She started selling her goose outfits from a kiosk at a mall and eventually took over a 2,400-square-foot store. “I had to close my store because they demolished the mall,” says Gardner, who moved her operation in 2001 to her online lawngoosedesigns.com, where she sold to goose fans across the nation and the world. When she was laid off from her corporate job in 2006, “that little bit of money saved my life,” she says.

With her 50th high school reunion hosting events from Thursday, Oct. 4, through Sunday, Oct. 7, Gardner says she's eager to catch up with former classmates and see how their lives and careers have transformed during the decades. The world has changed much during their lifetimes, notes Gardner, who says her class witnessed some of that history together during their senior class trip to Washington. They were in the nation's capital the night of April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The class cut short their trip and flew home the next day.

“What I remember is seeing the snipers on the roofs and, of course, the smoke and the sense of panic,” Gardner says of the view when their plane was landing in Chicago.

Now a grandmother of two, Gardner says she hasn't decided what will become of her goose costume empire. With one of her major seamstresses no longer working because of age-related issues, Gardner recently stopped taking new orders, but she leaves her costumes online to inspire others.

She obviously doesn't mind career changes. “At age 63, I went back to school and am now a certified nutritionist,” she says, admitting she's pondering a new business along those lines.

“How do you go from being a little girl whose loving grandmother taught her how to sew on a treadle sewing machine to a lawn goose entrepreneur on the internet, and in between be a Playboy bunny?” Gardner says with a chuckle. But she'll always have a soft spot for a costumed goose.

One customer told the story of how her husband had a bad day at work and was feeling grouchy until he came home to see she had dressed the goose in front of their house in one of Gardner's red-white-and-blue Uncle Sam outfits.

“That is what it's all about. It's a simple pleasure and makes you smile,” Gardner says. “If you see a goose dressed up, you know there's a happy person inside.”