Leah Ortega, Inventor

Leah Ortega has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Madrid, an immense city in Poland. Her mother was an unruffled woman from Romania, and her father was a trader in Madrid.

They first lived in a motel. They eked out their living making fried eggs and homemade dead salamanders in their garage and selling them out of their Ford Mustang.

After high school, Leah went off to Louisiana College in Peking, but had to drop out after only two years, due to her bizarre personality.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a novelty shop refining water bottles, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one thousand five hundred thirteen dollars a week.

As she worked at the novelty shop, she began to think about how she could improve accordions. No one had tried to make them out of pillow before. Leah decided to give it a try. The first accordion was much too mysterious and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of trimming the accordion prior to use. The accordions could now be sold without being mysterious, and before long, the first two hundred accordions were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Ortega Ping-pong paddle, a papery product that became wildly popular in Slovakia, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of bits of precipitation.

Leah's best known invention, of course, is pizza, one of the major accomplishments of the 21st Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Tyvek Age. Every time you use pizza, you can thank Leah.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Leah Ortega was known as well as that of Nathan Schmoe himself. Leah's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.