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Daydream Believer · Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

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  Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
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  Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
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  Speaker 1: full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
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  Speaker 1: all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
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  Speaker 1: just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
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  Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Everyone has a mistake they wished they could erase,
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  Speaker 1: a poor decision they'd like to undo, or a path
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  Speaker 1: they wished they had taken. Unfortunately, there's rarely an eraser
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  Speaker 1: for our actions. We make a choice, and we live
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  Speaker 1: with the consequences. One woman, however, refused to accept those limitations.
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  Speaker 1: She set out to show the world that no mistake
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  Speaker 1: was so bad that it couldn't be erased or at
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  Speaker 1: least covered up. Her name was Betty Claire McMurray, and
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  Speaker 1: she was born in nineteen twenty four in Dallas, Texas.
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  Speaker 1: Her father, Jesse McMurray, managed an auto parts supply store,
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  Speaker 1: while her mother, Christine, ran a small knitting shop. Christine
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  Speaker 1: also helped foster a love of art in her daughter
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  Speaker 1: and taught her how to paint. After graduating high school,
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  Speaker 1: Betty married her first husband Warren, with whom she had
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  Speaker 1: her first child, Michael. Their marriage didn't last long, though.
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  Speaker 1: After their divorce in ninety six, Betty and Michael, along
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  Speaker 1: with her mother and sister, moved into a house her
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  Speaker 1: father had left her after he passed away. Now Betty
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  Speaker 1: needed a job. As a single mother with a small
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  Speaker 1: child at home, she had to find a way to
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  Speaker 1: put food on the table. She learned shorthand and how
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  Speaker 1: to type, and then used those skills to earn a
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  Speaker 1: job as a secretary at Texas Bank and Trust in Dallas.
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  Speaker 1: Betty was still new to typing, and so she made
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  Speaker 1: mistakes often. Older typewriters had keys that were harder to
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  Speaker 1: press and used a fabric ribbon, which made a race
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  Speaker 1: seen typographic errors easier. The modern electric typewriters in the
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  Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, though, had switched to a carbon ribbon, and
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  Speaker 1: their keys required much less pressure to depress. As a result,
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  Speaker 1: mistakes were not only more common, they couldn't be corrected
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  Speaker 1: without smudging carbon across the page. Betty didn't let her
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  Speaker 1: mistakes stop her, though she rose through the ranks to
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  Speaker 1: become executive secretary of Texas Bank and Trust. Still, she
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  Speaker 1: didn't love having to retype memos and documents because of
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  Speaker 1: one small error. While painting the bank's windows for the holidays,
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  Speaker 1: she thought back to what her mother had taught her.
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  Speaker 1: Artists don't throw out their canvases after making a mistake,
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  Speaker 1: They just paint over them. Betty went home and filled
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  Speaker 1: a small bottle with some temper a paint, which she
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  Speaker 1: matched to the color of the bank's stationary. She put
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  Speaker 1: the paint, as well as a watercolor brush, in her
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  Speaker 1: purse the next day and began covering up her typos
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  Speaker 1: as she made them. The other secretaries soon got wind
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  Speaker 1: of her new technique when they started asking for their
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  Speaker 1: own bottles of paint. Betty realized that she had stumbled
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  Speaker 1: upon something special. Over the next five years, her kitchen
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  Speaker 1: became a research laboratory. She consulted books as well as
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  Speaker 1: her son's chemistry teacher as she refined her formula, and
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  Speaker 1: that was the beginning of her new company, a company
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  Speaker 1: that didn't make a lot of money at first. She
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  Speaker 1: struggled for two years with young Michael helping fill bottles
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  Speaker 1: of paint solution at home. Then in nineteen fifty eight,
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  Speaker 1: two things happened. First, sales started to take off, and second,
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  Speaker 1: Betty made a mistake that she forgot to fix. She
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  Speaker 1: accidentally put the company's name on official bank correspondence. She
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  Speaker 1: was fired from her job as secretary, but it wasn't
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  Speaker 1: all that bad. She can now devote all of her
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  Speaker 1: time to her new business. Betty eventually moved it from
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  Speaker 1: her kitchen to her backyard, and when that became too small,
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  Speaker 1: she bought a small house in which she mixed and
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  Speaker 1: packaged the product for customers. The company broke a million
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  Speaker 1: dollars in revenue in nineteen sixty seven, and the following
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  Speaker 1: year Betty moved operations out of that house and into
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  Speaker 1: a full fledged production plant. Michael was no longer filling
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  Speaker 1: bottles for her anymore. Now she had almost twenty employees
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  Speaker 1: working for her, a number that grew again in a
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  Speaker 1: few years. Betty Ne Smith died in nineteen eighty, but
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  Speaker 1: in her short time on earth, she took her one
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  Speaker 1: woman company out of her kitchen and into a thirty
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  Speaker 1: five thousand square foot building with over two hundred employees.
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  Speaker 1: The year before she passed away, she sold her company
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  Speaker 1: to Gillette for close to fifty million dollars. It's name
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  Speaker 1: Liquid Paper. As for her son, Michael, he did okay
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  Speaker 1: for himself. He didn't follow in his mother's footsteps, though
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  Speaker 1: he's best remembered today as the lead singer of the
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  Speaker 1: TV singing group The Monkeys, although if you asked him,
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  Speaker 1: he'd probably say that the true rock star of the
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  Speaker 1: family was his mom. Celebrated artist Bob Ross was known
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  Speaker 1: for his positive outlook on life, as he painted happy
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  Speaker 1: trees and happy clouds among his happy mountains. He would
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  Speaker 1: inevitably make a wrong move. Some might have called it
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  Speaker 1: a mistake, but not Bob Ross. To him, there were
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  Speaker 1: no mistakes, only happy accidents. Happy accidents happen all the time.
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  Speaker 1: The microwave, quinine, even velcro were discovered by happenstance. So
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  Speaker 1: we're two potential plots against the United States. At the
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  Speaker 1: dawn of the nineteen sixties, Fidel Castro led a revolution
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  Speaker 1: against the standing Cuban governments. As part of his takeover,
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  Speaker 1: he cut ties with the US and opened a relationship
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  Speaker 1: with the Soviet Union, which took the Cold War between
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  Speaker 1: the US and the Russians to a whole new level.
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  Speaker 1: Hoping to bring an end to Castro's regime, America funded
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  Speaker 1: in Operation Involving Fire Cuban exiles. They had formed a
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  Speaker 1: counter revolutionary unit known as Brigade OH six, and invaded
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  Speaker 1: Cuba's southwestern coast, the Bay of Pigs, in an attempted
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  Speaker 1: coup against Castro and his forces. The mission failed. Many
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  Speaker 1: from the brigade were killed or captured, and President John F.
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  Speaker 1: Kennedy was forced to abandon all further efforts. Tensions grew
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  Speaker 1: between the U S and Cuba, and though no further
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  Speaker 1: military actions were taken, that didn't stop the CIA from
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  Speaker 1: keeping tabs on the communist territory. In nineteen sixty two,
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  Speaker 1: a CIA analyst had been examining recent surveillance photos of
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  Speaker 1: the island when he noticed something peculiar among the fuel
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  Speaker 1: trailers intents was an unexpected change to the landscape. This
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  Speaker 1: change kicked off a two week standoff between the United
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  Speaker 1: States and the Soviets that nearly resulted in nuclear war.
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  Speaker 1: In the end, though Kennedy told Soviet leader Krushchev that
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  Speaker 1: he would stay out of Cuba if the Soviets got
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  Speaker 1: their weapons out of there, which they did, an agreement
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  Speaker 1: between the two sides was reached and there was peace.
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  Speaker 1: Eight years later, Henry Kissinger brought a similar surveillance photo
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  Speaker 1: to Hr Heldaman, President Richard Nixon's chief of staff. He
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  Speaker 1: slammed it on Heldaman's desk and pointed to the large,
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  Speaker 1: rectangular objects that had caught his attention soccer fields. He
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  Speaker 1: was livid, but not in the Cuban's choice of sport.
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  Speaker 1: It was because soccer fields were an anomaly in Cuba,
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  Speaker 1: where the most popular sport by far was baseball, and
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  Speaker 1: it had been that way since it was first introduced
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  Speaker 1: back in eighteen seventy eight. Before Castro had banned all
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  Speaker 1: professional sports in nineteen fifty nine, players often traveled to
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  Speaker 1: the United States to participate in the American leagues. Once
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  Speaker 1: the band went into place, however, only amateur baseball was played,
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  Speaker 1: and diamonds started popping up all over the island. The
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  Speaker 1: CIA could tell an area's Cuban population based on the
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  Speaker 1: number of baseball diamonds. They spotted the presidence of soccer fields,
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  Speaker 1: as well as tennis courts and volleyball courts, though sent
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  Speaker 1: up red flags, or, as Henry Kissinger put it, Cubans
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  Speaker 1: don't play soccer, Soviets do. It turned out that the
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  Speaker 1: Soviet Union was building a naval base for ballistic submarines,
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  Speaker 1: a clear violation of the agreement put in place by
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  Speaker 1: Kennedy eight years earlier. The Soviets claimed they were doing
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  Speaker 1: no such thing, but dismantled their project anyway. Thankfully, whatever
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  Speaker 1: crisis had been brewing disappeared without incidents. Baseball diamonds came
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  Speaker 1: into play against several years later. In nineteen seventy five,
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  Speaker 1: Cuba sent its military advisers to South Africa, where they
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  Speaker 1: spent a few years assisting the People's Movement for Liberation
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  Speaker 1: of Angola. This group helped Angola secure its independence from Portugal.
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  Speaker 1: And how did the United States know? They had pictures
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  Speaker 1: of the baseball diamonds from above proof that Cubans were
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  Speaker 1: there helping them. Of course, sports fields weren't always a
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  Speaker 1: sign of enemy activity. Ronald Reagan and United States Colonel
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  Speaker 1: Oliver North tried to frame Cuba with them in the
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  Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. They claimed that the side of baseball diamonds
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  Speaker 1: in Nicaragua was proof that the Cubans were fighting another
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  Speaker 1: communist group, the Sandinistas. In reality, Nicaragwins also played baseball
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  Speaker 1: and the Cubans had nothing to do with it. Reagan
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  Speaker 1: had been funding Contra rebels to fight the Sandinista's by
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  Speaker 1: selling illegal weapons to Iran in what came to be
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  Speaker 1: known as the Iran Contra affair. It was such a
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  Speaker 1: scandal that it almost ended Reagan's presidency. Today, the late
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  Speaker 1: President Reagan's legacy isn't tainted by his terrorist negotiations. He's
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  Speaker 1: often remembered as a popular president who was simply looking
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  Speaker 1: out for his country, while Nixon went down as a
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  Speaker 1: corrupt politician bent on winning at all costs. History looks
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  Speaker 1: back on Kennedy, though, as a thoughtful president, one who
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  Speaker 1: spent thirteen days weighing a decision that could have cost
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  Speaker 1: him and the United States everything. But thanks to that
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  Speaker 1: CIA analysts happy accident, we all learned a valuable lesson.
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  Speaker 1: If you want to keep your operation a secret from
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  Speaker 1: the US government, don't build a soccer field on your base.
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  Speaker 1: I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
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  Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on podcasts, or learn more
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  Speaker 1: about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The
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  Speaker 1: show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with
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  Speaker 1: how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
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  Speaker 1: which is a podcast book series and television show, and
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  Speaker 1: you can learn all about it over at the World
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  Speaker 1: of lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,