Bette Nesmith Graham never set out to build a fortune. In the early 1950s, she was a single mother working as an executive secretary at Texas Bank & Trust in Dallas, and she just wanted her typing mistakes to disappear.
She knew artists fix errors by painting over them. So in 1951, she mixed water-based tempera paint in her kitchen blender and tinted it to match the bank’s stationery, according to the National Women’s History Museum. In her own words, she put the paint in a bottle, “took along my watercolor brush” and used it at the office.
Coworkers noticed. Other secretaries began asking if they could borrow some, and Graham started selling the mixture in 1956. She spent nights and weekends in her kitchen refining the formula, working through gallons of paint, Invention & Technology reports. Her son, Michael Nesmith, later became a member of The Monkees.
In 1958, she renamed the product Liquid Paper and applied for a patent and trademark. Before long, she was selling about 100 bottles a month, according to the Lemelson-MIT program. The business took off. By 1967, it was a million-dollar enterprise, and in 1968 she opened a new plant. By 1975, the company was producing 25 million bottles a year, and competitors such as Wite-Out had begun to appear. By 1976, Liquid Paper was sold in 31 countries. Graham built a child-care center and a library at the company’s Dallas headquarters, the museum says.
The bank, meanwhile, let her go because she was devoting too much time to the business.
In 1979, Graham sold Liquid Paper to Gillette for $47.5 million. She died the next year at age 56.
She left half her estate to her son and half to two charitable foundations she created to expand opportunities for women. He also received a royalty on every bottle sold until 2000. Newell Rubbermaid bought the brand from Gillette in 2000.
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