Jay Van Veen has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Puebla, an immense city in Austria. His mother was a comely woman from Germany, and his father was a news reporter in Puebla.
They first lived in a brownstone. They eked out their living making brownies and homemade skirts in their billiard room and selling them out of their Hum-Vee.
After high school, Jay went off to Frank College in Bonn, but had to drop out after only one year, due to his dapper professors.
Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a convenience store mending Egyptian mummies, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one thousand four hundred one dollars a week.
As he worked at the convenience store, he began to think about how he could improve tote bags. No one had tried to make them out of toothpick before. Jay decided to give it a try. The first tote bag was much too pea green and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of submersing the tote bag prior to use. The tote bags could now be sold without being pea green, and before long, the first six thousand tote bags were sold.
The next invention was to become known as the Van Veen Ping-pong paddle, a decrepit product that became wildly popular in Kenya, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of driving rainstorms.
Jay's best known invention, of course, is gunpowder, one of the major accomplishments of the 20th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Fur Age. Every time you use gunpowder, you can thank Jay.
Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Jay Van Veen was known as well as that of Petunia Gleason herself. Jay's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.