She started with lemonade and a toy cash register. Now she’s an inventor with a patent.

Forty years ago, Sharyn Horewitch was a 5-year-old tomboy in north Durham, a solitary girl who spent the days roaming her imagination, but her future came into dazzling clearness one afternoon thanks to cold drinks and childhood moxie.

It started when her brother opened a lemonade stand on the Fourth of July, pulling in dimes and quarters with a pair of his friends, shooing young Sharyn away.

So she retaliated in a fury of kindergarten spunk, setting up a competing stand across the street, offering not just lemonade but Starbursts, marshmallows and fruit roll-ups, grinning while the profits filled her toy cash register.

“It was probably Fisher Price,” she recalled at 46. “I told my mom, ‘They’re out here making money, why can’t I do this, too?’ The boys came up with the idea, and I wanted to make it better.”

This moment of schoolgirl enterprise caught the eye of a photographer for Durham’s newspapers at the time, who splashed Sharyn’s face across the next day’s afternoon paper, The Durham Sun. But the picture captured more than a plucky youngster winning a neighborhood snack battle. It traced a clear line between a girl who wouldn’t be pushed aside and a grown woman who spun gold out of everyday frustration.

Don’t tell her ‘you can’t’

On July 4, 2023 — four decades to the day after her lemonade victory — Horewitch learned she’d been granted a patent. Thanks to another jaunt through her imagination, she developed a new type of shoe that can’t be easily removed. Its inner straps keep the angriest toddler or the most cantankerous octogenarian from kicking them into space.

“I’ve always been this eccentric person that comes up with these ideas,” she told The N&O. “It’s almost a challenge for me when someone says, ‘You can’t.’ “

Horewitch didn’t walk a straight path between lemonade peddling and invention.

First, she trained in computer technology, which didn’t take. “My whole life I could never see myself working for someone else ...”

Then she auditioned, and eventually got, a part with Circle in the Square Theatre, which she opted against. “Love came in the picture ...”

She married, had two children, divorced and remarried, thinking by her mid-30s that motherhood had run its course. But two more children came past the time she thought it was possible, and Horewitch found herself juggling four.

Hit in the head with a shoe

Finally, in 2015, inspiration struck in the carpool line for one of the older kids’ schools, where she waited while the youngest two squirmed in the back seat.

“Wa bam!” she said, recalling the moment. “I get hit in the head with a shoe.”

The more Horewitch thought, the more she realized she spent a sizable chunk of each day putting kids’ shoes on and keeping them there, a daily skirmish with removable footwear. Her husband, Jerry, actually did the math: if the average parent spends several minutes a day fetching tossed shoes and wriggling them back on unwilling feet, the time added up to 10.5 days a year.

“That’s a vacation,” he said.

So the couple scratched out diagrams on a napkin at a Chinese restaurant until they hit the ideal design. Even armed with a napkin blueprint, people told Horewitch, “Don’t bother. It’ll never happen.”

But it did. After eight years and multiple hurdles, she got the patent approval on Independence Day. And thinking of that little girl with the Fisher Price cash register, Horewitch dug out the clipping and called my colleague Kevin Keister, the photographer who took that shot in his third week on the job for Durham’s two newspapers.

You see it here today.

After 40 years, Horewitch lives outside Charlotte, has her own limited liability company — NYOS LLC, which stands for Not Your Ordinary Shoe — and a prototype of her invention. She seeks investors and manufacturers for this early-stage business, and if her smile and toy cash register are any predictor, she’ll find them.

Woe to those say she can’t.