Ten Leap Frogs

 

Betty Nesmith Graham was a single mother working as a secretary in Dallas in the 1950’s. One of the things she hated most about her job was a single typo usually meant she’d have to retype the whole page. She knew there had to be a better way. She was watching artists painting a bank’s windows for the holidays when she had an epiphany. She mixed white tempera paint with a solvent at home in her kitchen blender. For months, she secretly used her formula at work. She painted over typos and let the solution dry before retyping. Other secretaries noticed her error-free work and begged for her formula. Bette mixed up batches of her “Mistake-Out” and sold them. She was eventually fired for spending too much time on her side hustle. But her “Liquid Paper,” as it was eventually named, became a $47,000,000 business. And her son Michael became a member of the Monkees.