Lorena Wozniak, Inventor

Lorena Wozniak has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Gillette, a hefty city in Morocco. Her mother was a weary woman from Hungary, and her father was a stunt performer in Gillette.

They first lived in a travel trailer. They eked out their living making sauerkraut and homemade potatoes in their tool shed and selling them out of their Ferrari.

After high school, Lorena went off to Potts College in Norfolk, but had to drop out after only nine years, due to her thoughtful professors.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a shoe store curling bowling balls, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on two thousand five hundred forty-nine dollars a week.

As she worked at the shoe store, she began to think about how she could improve artificial flowers. No one had tried to make them out of grass before. Lorena decided to give it a try. The first artificial flower was much too plastic and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of decontaminating the artificial flower prior to use. The artificial flowers could now be sold without being plastic, and before long, the first four thousand artificial flowers were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Wozniak Can of shaving cream, a bizarre product that became wildly popular in Albania, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of driving rainstorms.

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

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Lorena Wozniak was known as well as that of Petunia Harmon herself. Lorena's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.