Bette Nesmith Graham for USD $47.5 million in 1979. At the time, her company employed 200 people and made 25 million bottles of Liquid Paper per year. Bette Nesmith died on May 12, 1980, at the age of 56, in Richardson, Texas. From the start, Graham ran her company with a unique combination of spirituality, egalitarianism, and pragmatism. Raised a Methodist, Graham converted to Christian Science in 1942, and this faith inspired the development of her corporate "Statement of Policy". Part-code of ethics, part-business philosophy, it covered everything from her belief in a "Supreme Being" to a focus on decentralized decision making and
Michael Nesmith as his own solo recording and film projects. In 1998, Nesmith published his first novel, "The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora". It was developed originally as an online project and was later published as a hard cover book by St Martin's Press. Nesmith's second novel "The America Gene" was released in July 2009 as an online download from Videoranch.com. In the early 1980s, Nesmith teamed up with satirist P.J. O'Rourke to ride his vehicle "Timerider" in the annual Baja 1000 off-road race. This is chronicled in O'Rourke's 2009 book "Driving Like Crazy". During the 1990s, Nesmith, as Trustee and