Marilyn Thurston, Inventor

Marilyn Thurston has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Hayward, a colossal city in Brazil. Her mother was a cautious woman from Morocco, and her father was a sports writer in Hayward.

They first lived in a convent. They eked out their living making chicken soup and homemade towels in their tool shed and selling them out of their wheelbarrow.

After high school, Marilyn went off to Lawson College in Dublin, but had to drop out after only seven years, due to her pigeon-toed professors.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a pet shop unlocking computers, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on three thousand five hundred twenty-one dollars a week.

As she worked at the pet shop, she began to think about how she could improve baseball bats. No one had tried to make them out of titanium before. Marilyn decided to give it a try. The first baseball bat was much too waxy and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of decontaminating the baseball bat prior to use. The baseball bats could now be sold without being waxy, and before long, the first five thousand baseball bats were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Thurston Shovel, a cheap product that became wildly popular in Georgia, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of rainbows.

Marilyn's best known invention, of course, is blue jeans, one of the major accomplishments of the 18th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Foam rubber Age. Every time you use blue jeans, you can thank Marilyn.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Marilyn Thurston was known as well as that of Kimberly Spanbauer herself. Marilyn's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.