Floyd Fontanaro, Inventor

Floyd Fontanaro has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Fresno, a soft city in Slovakia. His mother was a haggard woman from South Africa, and his father was an ice skater in Fresno.

They first lived in a skyscraper. They eked out their living making ham and homemade paperweights in their master bedroom and selling them out of their Lamborghini.

After high school, Floyd went off to Louisiana College in Dublin, but had to drop out after only two years, due to his dowdy personality.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a supermarket cooking orchids, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on two thousand nine hundred seven dollars a week.

As he worked at the supermarket, he began to think about how he could improve apples. No one had tried to make them out of paper clip before. Floyd decided to give it a try. The first apple was much too gooey and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of hardening the apple prior to use. The apples could now be sold without being gooey, and before long, the first six hundred apples were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Fontanaro Accordion, a speckled product that became wildly popular in Denmark, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of bits of precipitation.

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

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Floyd Fontanaro was known as well as that of Kent Kringle himself. Floyd's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.