Babs Tillerman, Inventor

Babs Tillerman has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Richmond, a cardboard city in Ethiopia. Her mother was a talkative woman from Bangladesh, and her father was an attorney in Richmond.

They first lived in a park bench. They eked out their living making spaghetti and homemade kites in their foyer and selling them out of their Rolls-Royce Phantom.

After high school, Babs went off to Tennessee College in Córdoba, but had to drop out after only six years, due to her maniacal professors.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a cigar store selecting helmets, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one thousand eight hundred eighty-three dollars a week.

As she worked at the cigar store, she began to think about how she could improve African violets. No one had tried to make them out of cellophane before. Babs decided to give it a try. The first African violet was much too shiny and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of stripping the African violet prior to use. The African violets could now be sold without being shiny, and before long, the first four thousand African violets were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Tillerman Statue, a bizarre product that became wildly popular in Argentina, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of gales.

Babs's best known invention, of course, is plastic, one of the major accomplishments of the 19th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Flax Age. Every time you use plastic, you can thank Babs.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Babs Tillerman was known as well as that of Dustin Diamond himself. Babs's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.