Creative energy unleashed:

EVAN WILLIAMS/FLORIDA WEEKLY Bob Mosher, left, and Stanley Garczynski developed Bagel Bites in 1985 in Fort Myers. The company they started is now owned by H.J. Heinz Company but the tasty snack is still made in Lee County. Southwest Floridians are known for pioneering things like vast retirement communities, citrus operations and tourist hot spots. But creative minds diversify the local economy in myriad other ways, by escaping conventions and persevering to turn their ideas into dollars.

Here are a few inventors who took their ideas all the way, and in doing so, changed the way we live, work and play in Southwest Florida.

Cheese makes everything better

A factory in Fort Myers made $105 million worth of tiny bagels with pizza toppings last year. It's owned by the H.J. Heinz Company and you can find the item, Bagel Bites, in the frozen food aisle at Publix and grocery stores across the nation.

But Bob Mosher and Stanley Garczynski perfected the hors d'oeuvre in 1985 after becoming recreational tennis partners in Fort Myers.

FLORIDA WEEKLY FILE PHOTO Dr. Sharon Isern in her lab at Florida Gulf Coast University. Mr. Mosher, from Chicago, had a local catering business with his sister. They sometimes served the "three-bite" pizza bagels in the early 1980s. Mr. Garczynski was a high school teacher from New Hampshire who moved to Fort Myers and got into sales.

"I decided I didn't like the cold and snow and all that stuff," Mr. Garczynski said. "I was actually on my way to Hawaii and ended up staying here."

In their late 20s, the two men invested $20,000 in starting a new brand, Bagel Bites. They drew a mock-up of what the packaging would become and poured all their time and energy into making the snack sell.

Meanwhile their girlfriends — to whom they are now both married — supported them.

"We were young and dumb," Mr. Mosher remembers. But he added it was also that willingness to invest and risk everything that made the Bites a success.

"You really had to jump off the ledge and commit," he said. "You really need to believe in yourself and your product and give 110 percent; otherwise, it's not going to work."

EVAN WILLIAMS/FLORIDA WEEKLY Ed DeMartin in his Naples home. The recipe had come from a suggestion on a package of Lender's bagels, but so far no one had seriously marketed bagels as a miniature pizza. The partners specialordered extra small bagels from Lender's. They walked into restaurants, bars and hotels and pushed the Bites on chefs and owners. Soon they were ordering cheese by the truckload.

Their scheme worked almost too well; the growth was more than they bargained for. They sold about $1 million worth of bites in their first year, started hiring employees and moved to a 12,000-squarefoot plant by Page Field. In its second year, the company was on pace to do $6 million.

It was a perfect storm in the 1980s, they say — a craze for bite-size foods and bigbox stores like Sam's Club and later Costco coming online. And it didn't hurt that local restaurant owners started asking Sysco — a restaurant food supplier — to carry the product. They also spread the word about Bagel Bites at food product conventions.

In no time, big-name food production companies like Heinz, Kraft and Sarah Lee had swooped in and were making aggressive offers to buy them out.

"It was so quick and all of a sudden these people wanted us," Mr. Garczynski said. "We couldn't keep up with them."

Mr. Mosher agreed.

"They basically told us, 'do yourself a favor, guys and sell to one of us, or else,'" he said.

They ended up selling the business in 1987 to John Labatt Co., a giant Canadian beer and food conglomerate, only two years after the idea had taken shape. The partners stayed on for a while as managers and Heinz took over the company when it bought out a large portion of Labatt Co. in a $500 million deal in 1991.

Seven years ago, both having left Bagel Bites, Mr. Mosher and Mr. Garczynski began their third decade of partnership, when they started Sox Development Inc. in Fort Myers.

"Over the last six to seven years we've built more than 60 commercial strip centers in the Fort Myers area," Mr. Garczynski said.

They are pleased the Bagel Bites factory, 51,000 square feet under roof in East Fort Myers, remains local — creating 230 jobs on site and more when delivery drivers and other handlers are considered. "When we sold the company it continued to grow and some of those people who we hired are still at the factory," Mr. Mosher said. "We're really proud of the fact that they're still there. People make a living from it."

Journey to the center of a cell

Dr. Sharon Isern is doing big-time research at Florida Gulf Coast University — as in revolutionary, groundbreaking — but she likes to get down on a molecular level most days.

She found a new way to introduce materials into cells that could potentially cure diseases and even change DNA makeup.

That could mean delivering cancer drugs into a cell in a non-invasive way, unlike chemotherapy.

It could mean delivering DNA into a cell that actually changes its genetic structure, so genetic diseases like color blindness, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy or Parkinson's could be overridden.

The invention works by using a soundgenerating machine in a non-traditional way. The machine is traditionally used to violently break open organic material. But Dr. Isern discovered that if she "tweaked it down a few notches," it was possible to make gentle enough sound waves to create a hole in a cell that would eventually close up again.

While the hole is open, the cell is immersed in fluid — its natural habitat — and medicine or DNA can be floated through the hole. It's patent pending now.

"It was serendipity, really," she said. "There happened to be this piece of equipment and it was really a 'eureka' moment. It didn't work the first time. It takes a little finesse to find the right tweak."

How exactly the machine is tweaked is a secret.

An associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at FGCU, Dr. Isern is a member of the university's Biotechnology Research Group. She is also working on a number of patents that could inhibit the Dengue virus, a disease carried by mosquitoes. The World Health Organization estimates there are 50 million cases worldwide every year.

Besides curing diseases, her research could mean big business locally. FGCU wants to commercialize the technology by partnering with other business entities or researches groups that might relocate to this region.

One place that aims to attract those businesses is Madden Research Loop, a development at the airport that was strategically planned in close proximity to FGCU to lure medical researchers, pharmaceutical companies and other biotech industries.

Officials think it's a good idea because it diversifies the economy.

"It fits perfectly with our mission and the types of businesses we want to attract," said Lee County Commissioner Tammy Hall. "They're bringing dollars into the local community but they're not dependant on the cycles of the local community… The goal is not to have 75 percent of your economy in the construction Industry. "

Sexy mud flaps get truckers going

Ed DeMartin, 77, had just graduated from the prestigious Pratt Institute, School of Art and Design in New York. In his early 20s, he accepted a freelance assignment for the DuPont company, to promote its rubber products.

"They were selling to truck companies," Mr. DeMartin said, at his home in Naples. "They wanted me to do something that truckers would appreciate, so they would generate some goodwill for DuPont.

"I reasoned that all truckers love women, and I designed something that would fit on a truck mud flap. And it was a girl in silhouette, kind of with her hair blowing, in profile, showing her breasts, showing her rear end. And I designed it so it would basically fit into a square."

Mr. DeMartin was paid $50 for the assignment. Now it's a ubiquitous, iconic image. But to him, it's just a drawing.

"It's one of those lasting images that struck a responsive chord in people," he said. "The mud flap girl has probably been the most lasting image, and the smallest fee. Interesting."

Besides mud flaps, she's been on belt buckles, T-shirts and "The Sopranos" in the fictional "Bada Bing!" club.

Mr. DeMartin went on to open one of the world's leading private design firms. He created images that resonate in the culture, like the design for Tic Tac and an updating of the Morton Salt girl and Fruit of the Loom's log. He was also one of the first to project type onto a human figure. He designed the girl on Yuban coffee tins.

"That was the first can, by the way, that featured a photograph on the package," he said. "We were trying to change the look from an exotic foreign blend to an all-American coffee… we turned corporate images around so people could respond to that company more favorably."

He speculated about why the sexy silhouette on the mud flaps became so popular.

"There's a trick to memory and its associating with imagery," he said. "Something that you can create an image of in your mind is something that's very difficult to forget. So people respond to images, but for some reason, some images are more popular than others. As a designer, you look for symbols that relate to your client. In this case (of the sexy silhouette on mud flaps), it didn't relate to anything except men."

He doesn't think about that drawing too often now, out roaring around America's roadways.

"I just see her for what she was," he said, "a design assignment. I don't take anything more out of it than that."