Nelly Vandewater, Inventor

Nelly Vandewater has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Cairo, a rare city in Guatemala. Her mother was a cautious woman from Sweden, and her father was a clerk in Cairo.

They first lived in a townhouse. They eked out their living making oyster on the half-shell and homemade sticks in their garage and selling them out of their Mitsubishi Galant.

After high school, Nelly went off to New Mexico College in Lisbon, but had to drop out after only six years, due to her puzzled personality.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a shoe store yanking pairs of pliers, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on four hundred eighty-five dollars a week.

As she worked at the shoe store, she began to think about how she could improve bags of popcorn. No one had tried to make them out of rope before. Nelly decided to give it a try. The first bag of popcorn was much too new and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of hitting the bag of popcorn prior to use. The bags of popcorn could now be sold without being new, and before long, the first two hundred bags of popcorn were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Vandewater Pepper grinder, a charming product that became wildly popular in Turkey, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of drought.

Nelly's best known invention, of course, is the bikini, one of the major accomplishments of the 20th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Sugar Age. Every time you use the bikini, you can thank Nelly.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Nelly Vandewater was known as well as that of Zeke Holiday himself. Nelly's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.