Lorrie Killeen, Inventor

Lorrie Killeen has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Laredo, a hand-painted city in Denmark. Her mother was an enthusiastic woman from South Sudan, and her father was a bassoonist in Laredo.

They first lived in a quonset hut. They eked out their living making steak and homemade spinning wheels in their tool shed and selling them out of their Volkswagon Golf.

After high school, Lorrie went off to Stringer College in Fairbanks, but had to drop out after only nine years, due to her dumb professors.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a shoe store disguising magazines, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one thousand ninety-four dollars a week.

As she worked at the shoe store, she began to think about how she could improve Barbie dolls. No one had tried to make them out of feather before. Lorrie decided to give it a try. The first Barbie doll was much too hand-made and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of prodding the Barbie doll prior to use. The Barbie dolls could now be sold without being hand-made, and before long, the first four thousand Barbie dolls were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Killeen Whoopee cushion, an automatic product that became wildly popular in Samoa, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of humid days.

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

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Lorrie Killeen was known as well as that of Merna Berkshire herself. Lorrie's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.