How A Struggling Single Mother In The 1950s Turned A Typing Mistake Into A $200 Million Liquid Fortune (While Also Raising A Future Rock Star)

Bette Clair McMurray was born in Dallas in 1924. Her mother was an artist who ran a knitting store and loved oil painting. Her father worked at an auto parts store. Money was tight, and attending college was never even a remote possibility.

At 17, Bette dropped out of school and married her high school sweetheart, a guy named Warren. A year later, she was pregnant, and Warren was heading overseas to fight in World War II. Their son, Michael, was born in 1942 while his father was away.

Warren did not return for several years. When he finally came home, the marriage was rocky. The couple divorced in 1946, less than a year after his return.

Bette was now a divorced single mother with limited education, no money, and a young son to support. So she put herself through secretarial school and found a job at a bank.

Despite never being a particularly good typist, she gradually worked her way up. By 1951, Bette had become executive secretary to the chairman of the board. Her salary was $75 a week.

She lived paycheck to paycheck while raising Michael, but for the most part, life was comfortable.

Then, in 1954, the bank bought new typewriters.

A Very Bad Typist Meets A Very Sensitive Typewriter

In 1954, the bank upgraded to IBM electric typewriters. The new machines had much more sensitive keys, which suddenly caused Bette, already a struggling typist, to make typo after typo.

At the time, there was no easy way to fix a typewriter mistake. There was no delete key or digital document that could be corrected in a few seconds. One tiny typo could force Bette to remove the sheet of paper and type the entire page again from scratch.

Instead of simply getting frustrated, Bette got creative.

The daughter of an artist who also loved painting herself, Bette had an idea: When an artist makes a mistake, the artist does not throw away the entire canvas. They simply paint over the error. Why couldn't the same be true for a typist?

Bette began sneaking little bottles of fast-drying white tempera paint into work. Whenever she made a typo, she would simply paint over the mistake, allow it to dry, and type the correct letter on top. Her boss barely noticed, and soon the other secretaries wanted bottles of their own.

At that moment, Bette realized she might have a business.

And incredibly, this single mother in Dallas in the 1950s, with seemingly the entire deck stacked against her, had virtually no hesitation about taking the entrepreneurial plunge.

The Mistake Out Company

Bette formed a company called the Mistake Out Company. She devoured books from the public library to learn about paint formulas and reached out to a chemistry teacher for advice on improving the product's consistency. She experimented in her kitchen until she developed a mixture that dried quickly, adhered to paper, and could be typed over.

When she was finally satisfied, Bette looked into applying for a patent. Unfortunately, the application cost around $400. That was more than a month of her salary and the modern equivalent of several thousand dollars. That kind of cash was not simply sitting around.

And yet, she persisted.

Bette kept her day job at the bank. She recruited her teenage son and his friends to help fill bottles. At night, after coming home from work, she produced more correction fluid, filled orders, and sent samples to potential customers and wholesalers.

This is how it went for the next four years.

She worked at the bank during the day and built the Mistake Out Company at night, slowly trying to convince office workers that a little bottle of white paint could save them from having to retype an entire page.

Fired Over A Typing Mistake

Fate took the next step for Bette in 1958. One day, she accidentally signed a bank letter as being from "The Mistake Out Company."

When her boss noticed the mistake, there was no painting over it. Bette was fired on the spot.

Losing her steady paycheck could have ended the business. Instead, it forced her to plunge into entrepreneurship full-time.

That same year, Bette finally saved enough money to apply for a patent and trademark. She also changed the product's name from "Mistake Out" to "Liquid Paper." The company became the Liquid Paper Company.

Word began to spread. Bette's product was featured in an office supply magazine, and she began receiving large orders from companies including IBM and General Electric.

The operation eventually moved out of her kitchen and into a building in downtown Dallas. By 1964, the Liquid Paper Company was selling 260,000 bottles per year.

In 1968, a decade after Bette was fired from the bank, the company sold one million bottles. By the mid-1970s, Liquid Paper was selling around 25 million bottles a year.

The struggling secretary who had once been forced to retype entire pages because of a single mistake now controlled one of the most recognizable office supply companies in America.

Photo via User:FA2010/Wikimedia Commons

A $200 Million Liquid Fortune

In 1979, Bette sold the Liquid Paper Company to Gillette for $47.5 million. After adjusting for inflation, that's the same as $200 million in today's dollars.

It was an extraordinary outcome for a company that began with bottles of tempera paint mixed in a single mother's kitchen.

Tragically, Bette did not have much time to enjoy the proceeds. She suffered a stroke and died in 1980, less than a year after selling the company. She was 56 years old and worth around $50 million.

Before she died, Bette had already created two charitable foundations. The Gihon Foundation supported women working in the arts, while the Bette Clair McMurray Foundation supported female entrepreneurs.

Bette left half of her fortune to the two charities. She left the other half, around $25 million, to her only child, Michael, the son born in 1942 while Warren was overseas fighting in World War II. Warren's last name was Nesmith. Their child was named Michael Nesmith. Michael was 38 years old when he inherited half of his mother's estate.

After serving in the Air Force, he received a guitar as a gift and taught himself to play. He performed folk and country music around Texas, began writing his own songs, and eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he played clubs and recorded under the name Michael Blessing.

In 1965, Michael auditioned for a new television comedy about a struggling rock band. He was selected alongside Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork, and Davy Jones. The four actors soon became an actual recording group known as…

The Monkees

(Via Getty)

In retrospect, you might assume that The Monkees were a goofy fad TV show band. That may have been true, but that's not actually the whole story. They were also one of the biggest musical acts on the planet. In 1967, they became the first—and remain the only—act to place four different albums at #1 on the Billboard 200 during a single calendar year. That same year, The Monkees sold more records that year than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined.

Bette even made a cameo in an episode of "The Monkees." In the season-one episode "Dance, Monkee, Dance," which aired in 1966, she appeared as one of Michael's dance partners:

After his mother's death, Michael took over her foundations and continued giving millions of dollars to women in business and the arts.

But being a member of The Monkees was far from Michael Nesmith's only claim to fame. Like his mother, Michael had a powerful entrepreneurial streak.

Like Mother, Like Son

In 1974, Michael founded a production company called the Pacific Arts Corporation. His company went on to produce, acquire, and distribute a large library of original and licensed programming. By the 1980s, Pacific Arts reportedly controlled one of the largest catalogs of non-theatrical video titles in the world, including music videos and documentaries.

Michael's time as a musician and the founder of Pacific Arts also gave him a unique understanding of the potential of combining music and video.

In 1979, he developed a program called "PopClips" for the newly launched children's cable channel Nickelodeon. "PopClips" presented music videos hosted by an on-screen "video jockey," or VJ, rather than a radio DJ.

Warner Communications, Nickelodeon's parent company, acquired "PopClips" in 1980. The concept helped demonstrate the potential for a television channel built around music videos.

At midnight on August 1, 1981, Warner launched a new network that would show music videos 24 hours a day. They called the new network…

MTV

A Legacy That Could Not Be Erased

Why are most entrepreneurs young men? Because young men have absolutely ZERO risk of failure. They have no obligations. No wives. No kids. No pressure to get a wife or have a kid. No mortgage. Rent is probably split between two other 20-somethings and then also supplemented by parents. They're probably still on family health and phone plans.

Bette did not have that luxury.

In 1954, she was a 30-year-old divorced single mother living paycheck to paycheck on a secretary's salary in Dallas. She had no college degree, no investors, no business experience, and no financial cushion. She could not even afford the $400 required to apply for a patent. Walking away from her job to pursue an unproven product could have jeopardized not only her own future, but her son's as well.

Two decades later, she sold Liquid Paper for $47.5 million, funded generations of female artists and entrepreneurs, and left millions to a son who became both a rock star and a media pioneer.

Bette made a fortune helping people erase their mistakes. Her own greatest achievement began with the courage to risk making one.