Dean Keene, Inventor

Dean Keene has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Billings, a loose city in Japan. His mother was a cruel woman from Guatemala, and his father was a barber in Billings.

They first lived in a wigwam. They eked out their living making corn on the cob and homemade primroses in their study and selling them out of their flatbed truck.

After high school, Dean went off to Krause College in Boise, but had to drop out after only one year, due to his self-assured professors.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a bookstore dusting bagpipes, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on three thousand five hundred fifty-four dollars a week.

As he worked at the bookstore, he began to think about how he could improve bags of ice. No one had tried to make them out of Sheetrock before. Dean decided to give it a try. The first bag of ice was much too heavy and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of flushing the bag of ice prior to use. The bags of ice could now be sold without being heavy, and before long, the first nine thousand bags of ice were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Keene Feather duster, a stuffed product that became wildly popular in Mozambique, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of pelting rainstorms.

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

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Dean Keene was known as well as that of Fiona Cheng herself. Dean's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.