You Can’t Improve on That Spirit

Perhaps it’s genetically coded into all of us, this desire to invent or to perfect. To build the better mousetrap. As a kid, I imagined a device to eliminate parallel parking. You pulled up to the space, hit a switch, and temporary wheels, like airplane landing gear, emerged from under your car and moved you laterally into the space.

I never figured out what happens to your regular tires during the process but knew someone else could. Surely, someone still is working on that.

The truth, though, is that I don’t have the inventor’s mind or spirit. But a recent Time magazine cover on the “most amazing inventions of 2004” gave me a nice buzz: Even in this advanced age, people are still inventing.

It made me wonder what it’s like living with an inventor, which led me Tuesday morning to 20-year-old Ana Falley, who is telling about life with father. In her case, it was Michael Falley, who ran a nail-file manufacturing company in Huntington Beach named Realys Inc. and who also was an inventor -- even if he confined it to offshoots of his company’s product.

This must be cast in the past tense, because Michael Falley, known as Mikey, died Sept. 2. He was president of a local group known as the Inventors Forum and died of cardiac arrest at 62.

I give Ana my inventor’s stereotype: white lab coat and slightly daft. “He’s not a white lab coat guy,” Ana says, laughing while sometimes speaking of her father in the present tense, “but his brain was always going.”

Ana shows me a 3-foot-long nail file that her father invented. We’re not sure what it was for, but Ana says the dog enjoys being rubbed with it. His other creations, she says, were more practical.

“His files were washable,” Ana says. “He’d stick one in the dishwasher and say, ‘Let’s test this out and see if it falls apart.’ Or ‘Try this file on your feet.’ He’s the kind of person whose brain is always thinking of something new. It doesn’t stop. There would be times when my mom said he’d wake up in the middle of the night and get a pad of paper and start writing things down.”

Falley’s trademark was the ZZ Top beard he let grow and grow. He didn’t lay claim to any major inventions -- just incarnations of nail files or nail kits or whatever. “For sure, he’d try everything,” Ana says. “If it didn’t work, he forgot about it.”

A board member of the Inventors Forum says Falley’s main contribution was selflessness. “He helped more inventors than probably any other person in the area,” says Doug Rook. “He didn’t have an interest in sharing in profits. He wanted to get them to market.”

Ana thinks that although her father had a business to run, his real love was noodling or doodling in search of the better nail file product. “I think it was kind of what he lived for,” she says. “Everything had to go on paper [for the business], but he wasn’t a paper guy. He was this big 6-foot-3 guy who was out there and crazy and wild.... Everyone who met him, he made an impact on them.”

Six foot 3. Big, flowing beard that his mother once tried to trim while he was asleep. Mensa member. Former cop. Inventor of a 3-foot-long nail file.

I’ll accept that as conforming to my image of the inventor: the image of someone who, in the course of tinkering or inventing or whatever you call it, sees life not as limiting but as limitless. Sort of like Mikey Falley’s beard.

The next public meeting of the Inventors Forum is Feb. 11, with details on their inventorsforum.org website.

Good to know people are keeping the flame of inventing aglow.

“He was amazing and very interesting,” Ana says. “See that recliner chair in the corner? That’s Mikey’s chair. Every day after work, he’d come home, sit in the chair and watch TV. But sometimes he’d say, ‘Ana, come over here with a pad of paper.’ ”