A father of invention

By Darrell Laurant

Published: July 12, 2008

It’s happened to Sam Morrison eight times, he said. It happened to me once, and that was enough.

I was just drifting off to sleep in a motel room in South Carolina some years ago when the door suddenly burst open, the lights went on, and there stood a woman with — I swear I’m not making this up — a birdcage with a parakeet in it.

She screamed. I yelled. I don’t remember what the bird did.

How could something like this happen?

“The room clerks don’t always pay attention,” said Morrison, who has come up with an invention for just such a situation. “Sometimes, they’ll give the same room to two people.”

Granted, this is usually more embarrassing than threatening. But in case you fret about having your motel room invaded by strangers, Morrison’s “Secure-A-Door” should be more than enough to ease your mind.

In a way, his invention is a counterattack against another recent invention — the “bump key.”

“It’s a package of anywhere from 11 to 18 keys,” he said, “and with them, you can open pretty much any door.”

But how about those that are chained from the inside?

“If there’s any give in the door at all, you can slip something through the gap and flip the chain,” Morrison said. “Or, there’s a magnet that you can use to slide the chain off from outside.”

I’m glad he’s on our side.

Morrison, a Forest resident, is 76 years old and has re-invented almost everything but himself.

“I’ve been an inventor all my life,” he said. “For the last 40 years, I’ve been working for myself.”

His first invention, he recalled, was a critical success but a financial flop.

“My wife was always hanging clothes all over the house,” he said, “so I came up with a hanger that would fit on the end of an ironing board. Everyone I showed it to loved it.”

So he had 1,000 of them manufactured, only to be told by corporate America that his invention was behind the curve.

“Nobody irons any more,” they told me. “That was the age of polyester.”

Undaunted, Morrison came up with a couple of inventions to aid the tire industry — most notably, a better way to inflate tubeless tires.

“I called it the Easy Bead Inflater,” Morrison said, “and I’ve done real well with it.”

The add-on automobile headrest was somewhat less successful.

Morrison has four patents, he said, with another pending on the Secure-A-Door.

“I’ve had the most luck selling it to colleges,” he said. “When the shooting happened at Virginia Tech, the guy was able to get in every classroom door.”

Or perhaps a student would like to make sure she doesn’t wind up with uninvited guests in her dorm room.

“I’ve worked up a deal that it’s hard for colleges to refuse,” said Morrison. “The Secure-A-Lock retails for $19.95, but I’ll sell it to colleges for $9. They sell it back to students for $10. I’ll even put a college logo on some of them so they can sell them in their bookstores.”

Longwood has already put in an order, he said.

He carries around a mockup of a door in the back of his pickup truck, the better to demonstrate his device. I tried it and was impressed. In a nutshell, the Secure-A-Lock consists of a metal strip that rests on the strike plate of the door, a metal lock that is fixed into position by a button and a plastic wedge that slides into place to tighten the lock fiercely.

“I showed it to one guy,” Morrison recalled, “and he said, ‘But I could kick the door open.’

“I invited him to try, and he did (try), but I finally had to get him to stop because the walls were starting to come down.”

At a recent home show in Indianapolis, he said, a woman bought 10 of them, one for every door.

“She told me somebody had broken into her house while she was sleeping and stolen everything but her pajamas,” Morrison said.

He goes on the road less frequently these days, but still plays golf at least once a week (“I can usually keep it in the 80s,” he said) and does a lot of volunteer work.

And thinks. A lot.

“There’s no telling what I might still come up with,” he said.