Lillian Lancaster, Inventor

Lillian Lancaster has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Memphis, a gooey city in the Philippines. Her mother was a frumpy woman from Spain, and her father was a boat captain in Memphis.

They first lived in a crypt. They eked out their living making shrimp and homemade houseplants in their den and selling them out of their Toyota Corolla.

After high school, Lillian went off to Minnesota College in Lancaster, but had to drop out after only five years, due to her anemic personality.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a Starbucks reinforcing pairs of knitting needles, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one thousand seven hundred sixty-four dollars a week.

As she worked at the Starbucks, she began to think about how she could improve hot potatoes. No one had tried to make them out of adobe before. Lillian decided to give it a try. The first hot potato was much too modern and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of striking the hot potato prior to use. The hot potatoes could now be sold without being modern, and before long, the first three hundred hot potatoes were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Lancaster Tube of toothpaste, a stolen product that became wildly popular in Korea, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of earthquakes.

Lillian's best known invention, of course, is Play-Doh, one of the major accomplishments of the 18th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Hair Age. Every time you use Play-Doh, you can thank Lillian.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Lillian Lancaster was known as well as that of Jim Bob Fancypants himself. Lillian's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.