Junior High Student, 13, Gets Leg Up on Assignment

Thirteen-year-old Leslie Seal’s career as a child inventor began the day she tried to pull a Bart Simpson on a junior high school history assignment.

The very night before the deadline on a two-week project to come up with an invention, the Encinitas teen-ager admitted to her father that she hadn’t even come up with an idea yet, much less a working model. As fathers will do, Galen Seal suggested that his daughter go to her room and think about it a while.

Before the evening was through, the fresh-faced student at San Diegueno Junior High--whose lifelong passion has been riding horses--not only found an answer to her problem, she struck upon what local equestrians have called an ingenious way to assist smaller riders in mounting large horses.

Using a simple piece of 5-foot-long rope looped at one end, the eighth-grader devised a way to hoist herself into the stirrups with her own weight as leverage--a mounting method she says beats hopping from clumsy stools, fence posts and tree limbs, or even getting a leg up from Dad.

This week, with the help of her father, Leslie applied for an official U.S. patent for an upgraded model of her invention, a section of sturdy polypropylene with a plastic stirrup attached to one end.

The device, Leslie says, can be used with either a Western or English-style riding saddle to lift diminutive riders like herself onto a horse’s back without assistance.

Together, the father-daughter team also has plans to market her invention under the name LegUp Mounting Stirrup for $21.95--aiming at horse supply mail-order catalogues nationwide and even some local tack outlets. A leather version will cost about $10 more.

“We’re partners in this,” said Galen Seal, adding that an 800 number will help them take orders nationwide. “Whatever profit we make, we split it right down the middle.”

Patty Cameron, a tack expert and horse rider who works at Mary’s Tack and Feed in Del Mar, one outlet where the device will be sold, said she was amazed at the simplicity of young Leslie’s mounting contraption.

“Like so many good inventions, it’s so wonderfully simple,” she said. “I think it’s going to work.”

Leslie, whose family owns two horses--an Appaloosa named Bea and a quarter horse horse named Chipper--concedes that concern over a

favorite pair of blue jeans inspired the invention.

Recently, a 13-year-old friend named Melanie had tried to mount Bea while wearing a pair of Leslie’s designer jeans. “She tried to mount the horse by swinging herself into the stirrups,” Leslie recalled.

“I told her she was going to rip my Guess jeans because they were too tight on her. She kept saying ‘I can do it. I can do it.’ She ripped my jeans.”

A horseback rider since the age of 5, Leslie recalled her frustrating efforts to mount her horse when her father wasn’t around to help.

“I’d try to get the horse next to big rocks, fences or tree branches--anything I could find--and I had friends hold on to her,” she said. “But my horse usually knows what I’m trying to do. So she tries to walk away. It was a real battle.”

Leslie, who at 5-foot-3 stands eye-to-eye with the horse-mounted Western saddle, Friday demonstrated how to use her device. With one end attached to the saddle horn, the plastic stirrup hung low enough so that she could easily slide her right foot into place.

She then stepped up and thrust her left foot into the regular stirrup before throwing her right leg around the back of the horse. Unlike a step-up stool, she said, her device can be affixed to the saddle and carried wherever the horse and rider go.

After repeatedly trying out Leslie’s crudely fashioned rope to make sure the idea indeed worked, the family contacted a patent attorney to investigate any precedents on the mounting device.

“He was just amazed,” Seal recalled. “The idea was so basic, and yet his research showed that no one else had apparently thought of it before.”

Seal says he had been advised to keep his daughter’s idea quiet--even from friends and classmates--until a patent application was filed this week, and that he has yet to consult with local equestrian clubs about its value.

But he has worked out a deal with an outdoor supply concern to construct the mounting stirrups in Temecula while the family assembles them at the office of Seal’s Encinitas printing concern. The first 100 stirrups should be ready for sale by next week, he said.

“Everyone who sees the thing says that Leslie will have no problem financing her own way to college,” Seal said.

John Sumner, the family’s patent lawyer, said Leslie was by far the youngest patent applicant he has ever worked with. “Most often, they’re people in their 20s or older,” he said.

“But Leslie’s really amazed a lot of people with what one little girl can do with a high school project.” He said the patent should be granted within a year.

Despite all the high hopes for her invention, her parents say, Leslie has seemed nonplussed about the marketing possibilities for such a product--or of riding high in the saddle in the business world.

“To think that some people spend their lives trying to invent things and never get a patent,” said her mother, Segried Seal. “But Leslie is 13 years old. She’s got lots of irons in the fire.”

By the way, Leslie’s grade for her invention project was 48 out of a possible 50 points. “The teacher took two points off for my demonstration,” she said.

“I had to do it on a table. I couldn’t bring my horse to school.”