The Potter v. Fibreboard case file (1969-1972)

The district court file from Potter v. Fibreboard Paper Products Corporation, et al., Civil Action No. 6329 in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Beaumont Division. Samuel R. Potter was an insulator from Orange, Texas, who had worked with asbestos insulation for about 27 years, and his lawyer was Ward Stephenson. He filed in May 1969, between Claude Tomplait's trial and Clarence Borel's complaint. The file holds 276 documents and 1,999 pages, from the complaint through the judgment of February 1972.

The case

The judgment names twelve defendants: Fibreboard, Combustion Engineering, Johns-Manville Products, Owens-Corning Fiberglas, Eagle-Picher, Pittsburgh Corning, Unarco, Philip Carey, Armstrong Contracting & Supply, Standard Asbestos, Ruberoid and Armstrong Cork. The insurer of his last employer, Babcock & Wilcox, intervened to recover the workers' compensation it had paid. Potter's case moved alongside Clarence Borel's and J. J. Crawford's, and in November 1970 the three plaintiffs moved jointly for partial summary judgment.

After the Borel jury found against the manufacturers in September 1971, Potter asked the court to hold five of his defendants bound by those findings. The court had already denied the defendants' motion for summary judgment, which argued both liability and the statute of limitations. The case went to trial in February 1972, and before it ended every party had settled. The court entered judgment on the settlements on February 22, 1972, after two defendants' settlements had been approved separately: Standard Asbestos for $3,228.54 and Pittsburgh Corning for $6,728.90.

Two of these cases are in the Library too: the Borel v. Fibreboard case file and the Tomplait v. Combustion Engineering case file.

How the file is organized

The documents are grouped by stage of the case: pleadings, motions and orders, discovery, depositions, settlements and the judgment, and correspondence. Within each stage they're listed by date, with the party that filed each one. The last stage holds a 129-page certified copy of the pleadings from an earlier National Archives order. The documents most worth reading first are marked as key documents, and every document is searchable. Among them is a 1968 letter from the Kettering Laboratory to Philip Carey reporting the dust measured while workers cut Carey Temp insulation.

About these copies

We bought the complete file from the National Archives. The scans were cleaned up and made searchable, which took them from 2.3 GB to 84 MB. The file names are our own: abbreviations are written out (SA is Standard Asbestos, CE is Combustion Engineering) and obvious typos are fixed.

Samuel Potter's Social Security number and driver's license number have been blacked out wherever they appear. The W-2 forms attached to his answers to Pittsburgh Corning's interrogatories are not published, and neither are the itemized hospital bills attached to two hospital record depositions. The answers and testimony are.