Johnny Sekora, Inventor

Johnny Sekora has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Peking, a bizarre city in Vietnam. His mother was a miniscule woman from Mongolia, and his father was a harpist in Peking.

They first lived in a housing project. They eked out their living making pizza and homemade ironing boards in their attic and selling them out of their skateboard.

After high school, Johnny went off to Fontanaro College in San Francisco, but had to drop out after only four years, due to his sleepy professors.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a bank gripping bedpans, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on four thousand one hundred eighty-five dollars a week.

As he worked at the bank, he began to think about how he could improve baseballs. No one had tried to make them out of mud bricks before. Johnny decided to give it a try. The first baseball was much too multicolored and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of experiencing the baseball prior to use. The baseballs could now be sold without being multicolored, and before long, the first five thousand baseballs were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Sekora Can of soup, an odd product that became wildly popular in Slovakia, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of hailstorms.

Johnny's best known invention, of course, is the loom, one of the major accomplishments of the 17th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Portland cement Age. Every time you use the loom, you can thank Johnny.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Johnny Sekora was known as well as that of Savannah Crawford herself. Johnny's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.