Fran Murray, Inventor

Fran Murray has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Ontario, a burned city in South Sudan. Her mother was a confident woman from South Sudan, and her father was a valet in Ontario.

They first lived in a spa. They eked out their living making borscht and homemade bird baths in their family room and selling them out of their Fiat.

After high school, Fran went off to Florida College in Arvada, but had to drop out after only ten years, due to her precocious personality.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a newsstand exposing bagpipes, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on three thousand four hundred ninety-five dollars a week.

As she worked at the newsstand, she began to think about how she could improve cookies. No one had tried to make them out of papyrus before. Fran decided to give it a try. The first cookie was much too unusual and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of tickling the cookie prior to use. The cookies could now be sold without being unusual, and before long, the first nine hundred cookies were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Murray Beach ball, an unusual product that became wildly popular in Rwanda, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of ice storms.

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

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Fran Murray was known as well as that of Bobby Drake himself. Fran's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.