THE NECESSITY OF INVENTION
THEY WERE 10 YEARS OLD, AND THEY’D READ KON-TIKI, SO THEY BUILT A BOAT. IT HAD A COMPARTMENT WHERE THEY COULD SLEEP, A TOP DECK, A SAIL, EMPTY WATER BOTTLES TO MAKE IT FLOAT, AND CARGO: FIVE GIANT JARS OF PEANUT BUTTER AND FIVE GALLONS OF MILK (TO LAST THEM TO TAHITI).
Mike and his buddy launched their 12-foot boat into one of the labyrinthine canals of Boca Raton. It sailed smoothly all the way to the second canal, which was larger and a bit more challenging. When they tacked into the third canal, they saw alligators and, about 1,000 feet ahead, a blue strip of ocean. In between, big ships churned the water, tossing and engulfing their tiny craft. Reality sank in: They’d never make it to the ocean.
They traipsed home and thought it through. At least Mike did—the other kid had left it up to him. How to get past the waves? Finally, it came to him. He threaded a huge length of nylon rope through an opening in the front of their boat. They’d use stakes to stretch it from one side of the canal to the other. When a boat passed, the rope would hook on, and they’d be towed out to sea.
His plan worked. A big white boat hit the rope and, with a whoosh, they swept across the waves and into the ocean, where they paddled furiously for about 20 minutes—until their boat sank.
They lost their fishing rods, their peanut butter, their boat. They swam to shore and walked home. But defeat did not stop the dreaming.
Michael Saigh would grow up to be an inventor—feverishly thinking up solutions like a gambler at the craps table, hoping each time to get lucky. Years before Kindle or iTunes, he would come up with a framework for mobile access to databases. He also envisioned an alert system that takes over your phone during an active shooter attack, an investment network that could turn masterpieces and rare antiques into liquid assets, a smart bit that just might revolutionize horse racing, and—his latest, as-yet-unrealized hope—a way to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. and stabilize the economy. Saigh would stay under the radar, living quietly in St. Louis and assiduously avoiding the spotlight, but those who came to know him would declare him a genius.
Mike wriggled down from his uncle’s lap and fished a long curl of paper out of the trash. Fred Saigh watched that ticker tape for his thousands of stock holdings, then clipped out the quote and pasted it in a notebook. When he missed one, it was his young nephew’s job to retrieve it.
Fred was quite a mentor. He had received his law degree at age 21, handled the divorce of one of Winston Churchill’s daughters, started a company, bought the Railway Exchange and Scruggs-Vandervoort-Barney buildings, then snapped up the St. Louis Cardinals. He sold the team to Anheuser-Busch in 1953 for far less than he would have made from an out-of-town buyer because he wanted the Cards to stay in St. Louis.
Fred had a cool life—he’s in a, even—but he worked constantly, even in a suit. Later in life, he was convicted of tax evasion, and serving time in a federal penitentiary siphoned some of the verve from his personality. Nonetheless, he lived to age 94 and died worth about $500 million.
