The shoe fits

He wasn’t even a runner, but Ron Stirtz’s first patent, issued about 30 years ago, was for a shock-absorbing midsole for running shoes that became a fixture in the Adidas line and earned him enough in royalties to support his penchant for invention.

“I didn’t run a step that I could walk,” the 73-year-old quips.

Stirtz happened to meet University of Oregon track coach Bill Dellinger back in the late 1970s at a party hosted by a mutual friend. The conversation turned to the problem runners experienced from the pounding their feet took in the sport’s then-uncushioned shoes.

“I said I could fix that,” Stirtz recalls, and Dellinger took him up on it. After some trial and error, Stirtz came up with a “wonderfully simple” concept, wrapping nylon netting around the shoe’s foam rubber insole. Using the netting spread the force of the impact across the entire surface of the insole instead of concentrating it at the point where the foot hit the ground.

Since his childhood in Wayne, Neb., Stirtz has been intrigued by the challenge of seeing a problem and solving it.｛%｝ from China, buy China wholesale Women's Shoes products and find high quality Women's Shoes products。wholesale women shoes His first big idea came when he was 12 years old and spent some time — at another party — in the company of a continually squalling baby. His mother told him the baby probably was in pain from swallowing air while sucking milk from its baby bottle.

“I did a sketch of a bottle with a plastic bag insert that would collapse as the baby drank so it couldn’t suck air in with the milk,” Stirtz recalls. “My parents thought it was cute, and then it went into the trash can.”

Some time later, Johnson & Johnson revolutionized the baby bottle market, using the same principle Stirtz had illustrated in his drawing.

From that, he learned that, “Even little kids could have big ideas.”

Stirtz spent his childhood in Nebraska and attended a prep school in Chicago before enrolling at Wayne State University in Detroit and then the University of Nebraska, where he studied physics. After his father died from complications of a stroke, his mother took a job in California.

“She said I couldn’t go to the University of Nebraska anymore because I would be an out-of-state student and the tuition would be too much, so I went to the University of California at Long Beach and changed my major to psychology.”

He and his wife, Sharon,ice bag sale moved to Oregon, where he taught math in Roseburg for two years before pursuing a master’s and doctorate in psychology while she taught in the Crow-Applegate-Lorane School District.

“It was right after that the Adidas thing came along,” he said. From there he turned his attention to fishing lures, to solve the problem of trolling with bait that doesn’t have sufficient action in the water to attract fish. Stirtz patented the Smile Blade, Flash Lite and Hot Wings blades that are manufactured by the Mack’s Lure company in Wenatchee, Wash.

In all, he’s got 10 patents to his name — three of them this year alone — and a couple more on the drawing board.

His ideas range from one some might consider frivolous — a toss game he calls Rockin’ Socks that he hopes to market to sports bars and cruise ships as well as through toy stores and other retail outlets — to serious,Hi-Efficiency Filter Bags is supplied by manufacturer. including an energy-saving water faucet and a football helmet that protects the brain more effectively from concussions than anything now on the market.

He’s had a lot of trouble getting coaches and others in football programs to give him the time of day about his helmet design, which he hasn’t tried yet to patent “because that takes a couple of years to complete, and I don’t want to see players getting injured for two more years in the meantime,” Stirtz says.

He understands that “there are many people who dabble in inventing, and the big people learn not to listen, but I would think that having the considerable success with it that I’ve had would at least get me through the door.”

Although his most important ideas grow out of the frustration of something being done poorly, some of the most fun come during vacation trips to Mexico or other warm--climate resorts.

“My wife loves to go to those places, to spend time on the beach, but there’s nothing I go for except good food,” Stirtz says. “So when we go somewhere like that for two weeks,Wholesale Sunglasses, You Can Buy Various High Quality Wholesale Sunglasses Products from Global Wholesale Sunglasses Manufacturers. I try to design at least one thing while I’m there.”

That may be where his new toss game,And she turned Bryn into a style rebel as well, dressing her in a white tank top, floral-printed overall shorts and a pair of purple crocs sandals sale. Rockin’ Socks,Our Filter Mesh for Sale rang from 10N/inch to 400N/inch and the mesh pore size goes from 2000microns to 20micron and could meet a wide range of demand for filtration accuracy. available at Eugene Toy & Hobby, got its start.