I was only going about 10 miles an hour," says Carl Goldberg. But when an oncoming car veered into his lane on a winding Colorado mountain road in 1995, Goldberg braked hard—and Max, his chocolate Lab, flew into the windshield. Max was unhurt (the BMW's windshield was made to pop out on impact), but Goldberg was shaken by his best friend's close call. "I couldn't take this heart attack again," he says.
So with help from Max's vet, Goldberg designed a doggy seat belt: the Ruff Rider Roadie, a figure-eight-shaped nylon harness that clips into a car's seat-belt buckle. The $40 restraint was rated the best on the market by the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine's Your Dog magazine, and Goldberg now nets about $15,000 a month in sales from pet stores nationwide. "I'm glad I got it," says Anna Abney, a Greenwood, S.C., kennel worker whose car was hit on the passenger side by a pickup truck in September. Her chow-husky mix Eve, who was in the front seat, "would have hit the steering wheel, if not gone out the window, if she hadn't had it on."
A Pittsburgh native, Goldberg, 51, is a seasoned entrepreneur: Since dropping out of college in 1970 to become a self-described "hippie," he has traded turquoise jewelry and sold organic coffee. The divorced father of Karina, 22, Goldberg lives in Boulder, Colo., with girlfriend Linda Parker, 32, and three dogs. (Max died in 1998.) He is proudest of his "puppy program," which gives customers a discount for returning pups' outgrown Roadies. He donates the used models to the Boulder Humane Society, which gives them away with adoptees. "Now," he says, "another dog gets saved for free."
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