Daydream Believer

Today's tour through the Cabinet will demonstrate just how inventing people can be.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

(00:27):
of Curiosities. Everyone has a mistake they wished they could erase,
a poor decision they'd like to undo, or a path
they wished they had taken. Unfortunately, there's rarely an eraser
for our actions. We make a choice, and we live

(00:49):
with the consequences. One woman, however, refused to accept those limitations.
She set out to show the world that no mistake
was so bad that it couldn't be erased or at
least covered up. Her name was Betty Claire McMurray, and
she was born in nineteen twenty four in Dallas, Texas.
Her father, Jesse McMurray, managed an auto parts supply store,

(01:10):
while her mother, Christine, ran a small knitting shop. Christine
also helped foster a love of art in her daughter
and taught her how to paint. After graduating high school,
Betty married her first husband Warren, with whom she had
her first child, Michael. Their marriage didn't last long, though.
After their divorce in ninety six, Betty and Michael, along
with her mother and sister, moved into a house her

(01:32):
father had left her after he passed away. Now Betty
needed a job. As a single mother with a small
child at home, she had to find a way to
put food on the table. She learned shorthand and how
to type, and then used those skills to earn a
job as a secretary at Texas Bank and Trust in Dallas.
Betty was still new to typing, and so she made

(01:53):
mistakes often. Older typewriters had keys that were harder to
press and used a fabric ribbon, which made a race
seen typographic errors easier. The modern electric typewriters in the
nineteen fifties, though, had switched to a carbon ribbon, and
their keys required much less pressure to depress. As a result,
mistakes were not only more common, they couldn't be corrected

(02:14):
without smudging carbon across the page. Betty didn't let her
mistakes stop her, though she rose through the ranks to
become executive secretary of Texas Bank and Trust. Still, she
didn't love having to retype memos and documents because of
one small error. While painting the bank's windows for the holidays,
she thought back to what her mother had taught her.

(02:35):
Artists don't throw out their canvases after making a mistake,
They just paint over them. Betty went home and filled
a small bottle with some temper a paint, which she
matched to the color of the bank's stationary. She put
the paint, as well as a watercolor brush, in her
purse the next day and began covering up her typos
as she made them. The other secretaries soon got wind

(02:59):
of her new technique when they started asking for their
own bottles of paint. Betty realized that she had stumbled
upon something special. Over the next five years, her kitchen
became a research laboratory. She consulted books as well as
her son's chemistry teacher as she refined her formula, and
that was the beginning of her new company, a company

(03:19):
that didn't make a lot of money at first. She
struggled for two years with young Michael helping fill bottles
of paint solution at home. Then in nineteen fifty eight,
two things happened. First, sales started to take off, and second,
Betty made a mistake that she forgot to fix. She
accidentally put the company's name on official bank correspondence. She

(03:42):
was fired from her job as secretary, but it wasn't
all that bad. She can now devote all of her
time to her new business. Betty eventually moved it from
her kitchen to her backyard, and when that became too small,
she bought a small house in which she mixed and
packaged the product for customers. The company broke a million
dollars in revenue in nineteen sixty seven, and the following

(04:03):
year Betty moved operations out of that house and into
a full fledged production plant. Michael was no longer filling
bottles for her anymore. Now she had almost twenty employees
working for her, a number that grew again in a
few years. Betty Ne Smith died in nineteen eighty, but
in her short time on earth, she took her one
woman company out of her kitchen and into a thirty

(04:25):
five thousand square foot building with over two hundred employees.
The year before she passed away, she sold her company
to Gillette for close to fifty million dollars. It's name
Liquid Paper. As for her son, Michael, he did okay
for himself. He didn't follow in his mother's footsteps, though
he's best remembered today as the lead singer of the

(04:47):
TV singing group The Monkeys, although if you asked him,
he'd probably say that the true rock star of the
family was his mom. Celebrated artist Bob Ross was known

(05:11):
for his positive outlook on life, as he painted happy
trees and happy clouds among his happy mountains. He would
inevitably make a wrong move. Some might have called it
a mistake, but not Bob Ross. To him, there were
no mistakes, only happy accidents. Happy accidents happen all the time.
The microwave, quinine, even velcro were discovered by happenstance. So

(05:32):
we're two potential plots against the United States. At the
dawn of the nineteen sixties, Fidel Castro led a revolution
against the standing Cuban governments. As part of his takeover,
he cut ties with the US and opened a relationship
with the Soviet Union, which took the Cold War between
the US and the Russians to a whole new level.
Hoping to bring an end to Castro's regime, America funded

(05:54):
in Operation Involving Fire Cuban exiles. They had formed a
counter revolutionary unit known as Brigade OH six, and invaded
Cuba's southwestern coast, the Bay of Pigs, in an attempted
coup against Castro and his forces. The mission failed. Many
from the brigade were killed or captured, and President John F.
Kennedy was forced to abandon all further efforts. Tensions grew

(06:17):
between the U S and Cuba, and though no further
military actions were taken, that didn't stop the CIA from
keeping tabs on the communist territory. In nineteen sixty two,
a CIA analyst had been examining recent surveillance photos of
the island when he noticed something peculiar among the fuel
trailers intents was an unexpected change to the landscape. This

(06:39):
change kicked off a two week standoff between the United
States and the Soviets that nearly resulted in nuclear war.
In the end, though Kennedy told Soviet leader Krushchev that
he would stay out of Cuba if the Soviets got
their weapons out of there, which they did, an agreement
between the two sides was reached and there was peace.
Eight years later, Henry Kissinger brought a similar surveillance photo

(07:01):
to Hr Heldaman, President Richard Nixon's chief of staff. He
slammed it on Heldaman's desk and pointed to the large,
rectangular objects that had caught his attention soccer fields. He
was livid, but not in the Cuban's choice of sport.
It was because soccer fields were an anomaly in Cuba,
where the most popular sport by far was baseball, and

(07:23):
it had been that way since it was first introduced
back in eighteen seventy eight. Before Castro had banned all
professional sports in nineteen fifty nine, players often traveled to
the United States to participate in the American leagues. Once
the band went into place, however, only amateur baseball was played,
and diamonds started popping up all over the island. The
CIA could tell an area's Cuban population based on the

(07:45):
number of baseball diamonds. They spotted the presidence of soccer fields,
as well as tennis courts and volleyball courts, though sent
up red flags, or, as Henry Kissinger put it, Cubans
don't play soccer, Soviets do. It turned out that the
Soviet Union was building a naval base for ballistic submarines,
a clear violation of the agreement put in place by

(08:07):
Kennedy eight years earlier. The Soviets claimed they were doing
no such thing, but dismantled their project anyway. Thankfully, whatever
crisis had been brewing disappeared without incidents. Baseball diamonds came
into play against several years later. In nineteen seventy five,
Cuba sent its military advisers to South Africa, where they
spent a few years assisting the People's Movement for Liberation

(08:29):
of Angola. This group helped Angola secure its independence from Portugal.
And how did the United States know? They had pictures
of the baseball diamonds from above proof that Cubans were
there helping them. Of course, sports fields weren't always a
sign of enemy activity. Ronald Reagan and United States Colonel
Oliver North tried to frame Cuba with them in the

(08:50):
nineteen eighties. They claimed that the side of baseball diamonds
in Nicaragua was proof that the Cubans were fighting another
communist group, the Sandinistas. In reality, Nicaragwins also played baseball
and the Cubans had nothing to do with it. Reagan
had been funding Contra rebels to fight the Sandinista's by
selling illegal weapons to Iran in what came to be
known as the Iran Contra affair. It was such a

(09:12):
scandal that it almost ended Reagan's presidency. Today, the late
President Reagan's legacy isn't tainted by his terrorist negotiations. He's
often remembered as a popular president who was simply looking
out for his country, while Nixon went down as a
corrupt politician bent on winning at all costs. History looks
back on Kennedy, though, as a thoughtful president, one who

(09:33):
spent thirteen days weighing a decision that could have cost
him and the United States everything. But thanks to that
CIA analysts happy accident, we all learned a valuable lesson.
If you want to keep your operation a secret from
the US government, don't build a soccer field on your base.

(09:54):
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on podcasts, or learn more
about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The
show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with
how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
which is a podcast book series and television show, and

(10:17):
you can learn all about it over at the World
of lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,