Daydream Believer

for our actions. We make a choice, and we live 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,

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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

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