Born in 1924, Texan Bette Graham was a single mother who wanted to be an artist but she had to settle for life as a secretary in order to support her young son Michael. She began work for the Texas Bank & Trust in 1951 and, despite poor typing skills, Graham did well at work, becoming an executive secretary for the chairman of the board.
The story goes that Graham came up with the idea for Liquid Paper when workers were painting the bank windows for the holiday season. When a mistake was made on the window decorations it was simply painted over with white paint. She began to use white, water-based tempera paint and a thin paintbrush to cover her typing errors and called it Mistake Out. Initially she kept her idea to herself (her boss never noticed the paint on his documents). “I tried to keep it a secret,” she said. “For five years I did just that, still, others found out about it.” She did not sell the first bottle of Mistake Out until 1956.
Ever resourceful, Graham recruited an office supplier, a school chemistry teacher and a friend from a paint company to help her perfect her product which was becoming increasingly popular. Her son Michael and his friends helped fill bottles of Mistake Out with the whiteout in the garage. Graham had a good product, and renamed it Liquid Paper in 1958, but it was certainly no overnight success. She continued to work in the bank, managing the business after hours, making batches in her kitchen, packing and distributing from the garage.
In 1957, she was selling around 100 bottles a month. Good press coverage in a stationary magazine increased turnover five-fold and the business was showing signs of life.
In 1958, Graham was fired from the bank for allegedly using the bank’s letterhead on one of her Liquid Paper deals. By then she could just about afford to devote her time to the Liquid Paper business as orders kept coming in. The business kept growing. Part-time employees were hired but it was 13 years after she first created the correction fluid, in 1961, that Graham hired her first full-time employee.
In 1964, Liquid Paper headquarters moved to a purpose-built shed in her backyard.
In 1968, 17 years after devising Liquid Paper, the company was finally big enough to invest in a factory and grown-up head office. By 1969, the company was producing one million bottles each year. By 1972, five million bottles were sold, by 1975, 25 million bottles per year were sold and so on. Liquid Paper’s headquarters was built in Dallas and, under Graham’s instructions, included a childcare center and a library.
She retired from the company in 1975 and concentrated on entrepreneurial philanthropy, charitable work for women’s welfare and the arts. Graham died in 1980 aged 56, six months after selling her corporation for $US47.5 million to Gillette, leaving a fortune and royalties to her only son (who was in the pop band The Monkees) and to the charities she established. A Christian Scientist, Graham is remembered as a feminist whose invention showed people what women can do in a time when women were not seen beyond the role of the housewife.
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