Both brothers are divorced or separated from their wives. Niles had been married to a woman named Maris, a character that was referred to often, but never seen. The producers saved on a cast member and never had anyone play Maris.
Maris came from a very wealthy family. A family apparently, much to Niles's astonishment, that made their fortune in producing urinal cakes, those round discs that look like moth discs found inside urinals in men's rooms nearly everywhere. The nearly everywhere part is obviously how a family can make a fortune, especially if you've got the corner on urinal cakes.
Urinal cakes act as a bit of deodorizer to stanch the stench of urine, even though must users flush. And nowadays, if they've installed hands free equipment in a bathroom, the urinal flushes itself after the user zips up and steps away. It is very hi-tech when it works.
Anyway, self-flushing or not, urinal cakes can still be found. Niles, on learning where Maris's money comes from, starts to have a hissy fit. Niles has lots of hissy fits. Aside from that, the episode always got me thinking that the lowliest and most prosaic of products might be the source of someone's fortune.
The NYT more than anyone is keeping the art of writing obituaries alive. They are advancing the art with their daily devotion to space. There can be days when there are 6 bylined tribute obits in their pages. Lately, perhaps because of some guilt-trip trying to tip the scales that favored men getting all the attention when they reached Do Not Pass Go, they are featuring freshly written obituaries on notable women who in the past did not get even a notice of their passing, much less the full-monty of words and context of their times. Their story was never told. 'Overlooked' is the heading for these obits.
These are great, not only because they are part of what for the Times I'm sure is a noble. long overdue effort, but because they are so damn interesting to someone like myself who reads these things as if they were past performances in the Daily Racing Form. In some ways, they are past performances. The difference is the person is not entered in any activities for the day. But then no one is who has passed away.
Thus, I lately learned there was a real Fanny Farmer who wrote a famous cook book, sometime around the end of the 19th century. I always thought Fanny Farmer was the candy company. Well, apparently someone paid to use her name when they went to produce candy. It is a line of candy I still miss. There once was a Fanny Farmer shop in the lower level at Grand Central Terminal. Ancient history. The company is out of business.
Sunday is my online day to read the NYT, and I always head to the obituary section first. Aside from the obituaries for people who have freshly passed away there is another one for historical women of note. The latest one is for Bette Nesmith Graham, who invented Liquid Paper, that potion in a tiny black and white bottle with a nail polish brush in the cap that all typists would resort to when they needed to correct a typing error. It was originally called 'Mistake Out,' which is exactly what it did. Now you see it, now you don't.
Ms. Graham, a single mom who took a typing job in 1954 in a bank had serious trouble being a good typist. Her mistakes multiplied when a new typewriter with more sensitive keys was introduced, and when the fabric ribbon went to a carbon ribbon. Erasing typos created smudges. Her output was turning into a mess.
Her mother was an artist, and Graham was also an artist, who knew artists covered up their mistakes with other paint; they didn't start all over. With this in mind, Graham, like many inventors, started experimenting in her kitchen, mixing tempera paints and finding ways to get the formula just right so that it could be applied to a page and then typed over.
Her prototype formula poured into nail polish bottles was so effective at work that other typists were asking her for a supply. She worked into the night at home to produce a supply for them and herself.
My office career began in the late 60s (1960s) and I remember the typists, all female (few men typed in those days), either had a bottle of Liquid Paper, or a pink wheel eraser with a brush at the other end that they would use to correct their typos.
I remember typing letters, poems and short stories at home on erasable typing paper that wouldn't smudge when you made an erasure.
Ms. Graham's idea took off. Patents, production buildings, offices, soon had to be built and dedicated to the company's product. Business boomed to the point of producing 25 million bottles of the magic stuff a year. Ms. Graham became rich. Every desk had one in the drawer. I still have a bottle in my desk drawer of a competitor's brand, "Wite Out, Quick Dry Correction Fluid," made by BIC, even though like many people, I do not use typewriter any longer. I barely use the correction product either.
Ms. Graham was fortunate enough to be able to sell her company after a protracted fight with her second husband, to Gillette for $47.5 million in 1980, just before the disruptive technology of the computer, printers and word processing software was being introduced in offices everywhere. The BACKSPACE key on a computer keyboard was going to be the death knell for the product.
Ms. Graham's product, even though not as important today as if was a few decades ago, was an example of someone coming up with a solution to a common problem, in this case, typos.
The effort and product is no different than the invention of kitty litter by Edward Lowe. Edward Lowe passed away in 1995, but his obituary by Robert McG. Thomas, Jr. has become a classic.
McG's obituary is sub-headed 'Cat Owners' Best Friend' and recounts how Mr. Lowe took sawdust from his father's sawdust business and mixed it was kiln dried granulated clay to produce an absorbent product that a cat-loving neighbor came back begging for more of. Kitty Litter was born.
There are tremendous similarities between Mr. Lowe and Ms. Graham. Both made the initiative to solve a widespread and vexing problem. One was, despite sawdust and sand used for a cat's litter, the stench of a cat's concentrated urine, a product of their evolution from a desert animal whose "efficient use of water produces a highly concentrated urine that is one of the most noxious effluences of the animal kingdom" made keeping a cat as a domestic animal a challenge to the nostrils. (Think of the problems of living with a camel.)
Ms. Graham also solved a common problem that afflicted typists: typos. Her correction fluid came to the rescue. Both Mr. Lowe and Ms. Graham used their wealth to create foundations, Mr. Lowe to help entrepreneurs avoid problems with family members who become part of the company, and Ms. Graham, who created two foundations to help striving women.
But we're not done. Obituaries dispense tidbits and connections we would not otherwise know. Consider Bette's second name in her surname, Nesmith. Yep, she was Mike's mom, Michael Nesmith of the band The Monkees, that 60s TV band, created to copy the Beatles using Americans.
"Hey, hey, hey, I'm a Monkee. My mom invented Liquid Paper." And without 'Overlooked Obits' we would never know what Mike's mom did.
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