Thursday, March 7, 2013

Bette Graham, Liquid Paper and a Monkee



This is Women's History Month and I've been busy searching for women I am unfamiliar with to post on the Facebook page associated with my women's history blog Saints, Sisters, and Sluts. I took a poll and choose the 4 highest areas of interest to be covered during the 4 weeks in March: Queens and Rulers, Inventors, women in science and math, and writers. I highlight one woman each day and then do the usual of sharing other things I find.

I read and write about women's history, but when the month started I realized that I didn't know of any women inventors! So, Google here I come, I began the search and this has turned out to be a fun category. Some of these items it wouldn't surprise you to know were invented by women,for example the dishwasher (Josephine Garis Cochrane in 1892), the rolling pin (Catherine Deiner in 1891), and disposable diapers (Marion Donovan in 1950.)

Some inventions we take for granted, but couldn't do without: windshield wipers (Mary Anderson in 1903), electric hot-water heater (Ida Forbes in 1917), and the medical syringe (Letitia Geer in 1899.) And some we rarely think about, but when we need them are a necessity, the life raft (Maria Beaseley in 1882) and Kevlar (Stephanie Kwolek in 1966.)

There was one invention that I found out about off-line. A friend told me that she thought the mother of one of the Monkees invented Liquid Paper®. (We were both little girls in the 1960s, so this was cool, at least then.) Well sure enough, it was Bette Graham.

Bette Clair McMurray was born in Dallas, Texas in 1924 and was raised in San Antonio. She graduated from high school and married her first husband in 1942 before he went off to WWII. She had a son later that year, but unfortunately the marriage didn’t last and she was divorced in 1946. 



As a single mother, Bette had to support herself and began working as a secretary at Texas Band and Trust. Soon she worked her way up the ladder to become an executive secretary, a plum position, especially in the 1950s when there wasn’t anything else open to women in the banking industry. This, of course, was before the days of word processors.  On a typewriter, once that wrong letter was hit it was too late. This meant that you had to try to erase it or retype the entire page.

Bette also had artistic talent and during holidays she painted department store windows. She realized that painters never erased mistakes, they just painted over them. So she mixed a little tempura paint in a bottle and took her brush to work. It worked and although she tried to keep it hidden, soon other people started borrowing her "paint." She made some improvements over the next few years with help from her son’s chemistry teacher.

In 1956, Bette began to market her correction fluid as “Mistake Out.” The name was later changed to Liquid Paper®. In 1979, Bette’s company had 200 employees and was making 25 million bottles of Liquid Paper® a year when she sold the company for $47.5 million.

When Bette Nesmith Graham died in 1980, her son Michael Nesmith inherited half of her $50 million estate. And yes that’s Michael Nesmith of the Monkees! 

The Monkees in 1967, from left to right Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork

No comments:

Post a Comment