The Tomplait v. Combustion Engineering case file (1962-1969)

The court file from Tomplait v. Combustion Engineering, Inc., et al., Civil Action No. 5402 in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Beaumont Division, and from the workers' compensation suit that came before it in Orange County. Claude Tomplait was an insulator from Bridge City, Texas, and his lawyer was Ward Stephenson, who filed Clarence Borel's case in October 1969. The file holds 348 documents and 2,544 pages, from his 1962 workers' compensation petition through the 1969 trial.

The case

Tomplait sued the companies whose insulation he had installed in December 1966: Combustion Engineering and R&I Refractory and Insulation, three Johns-Manville companies, Owens-Corning Fiberglas, Pittsburgh Corning, Gustin-Bacon, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, Fibreboard and Eagle-Picher, with Unarco added in 1969. The court granted summary judgment to several of them. In April 1969, five settled for $15,000 each, $75,000 in all, of which $7,500 went to the workers' compensation insurers who had intervened. Only Fibreboard went to trial. On May 19, 1969, after a week of testimony before Judge Joe J. Fisher, the jury found for Fibreboard, and the court denied a new trial that June.

Ward Stephenson filed Clarence Borel's case in the same court five months after the verdict, against many of the same companies, and won. That case is in the Borel v. Fibreboard case file, and his case for Samuel Potter, filed eight days after the Tomplait verdict, is in the Potter v. Fibreboard case file.

The workers' compensation case

Before the product suit, Tomplait claimed workers' compensation for asbestosis and silicosis in 1961 and 1962, and then sued three insurers in the 128th District Court of Orange County (Cause No. 13,916). Those papers are in their own stage at the end of the file, along with the Industrial Accident Board's claim file. It includes the August 1961 medical report that diagnosed pneumoconiosis after 21 years of insulation work.

How the file is organized

The documents are grouped by stage of the case: the docket, pleadings, motions and orders, discovery, depositions, the trial, post-trial, exhibits and records, correspondence, and the workers' compensation case. Within each stage they're listed by date, with the party that filed each one. The documents most worth reading first are marked as key documents, and every document is searchable.

About these copies

We bought the complete file from the National Archives. The scans were cleaned up and made searchable, which took them from 907 MB to 145 MB, and 24 exact duplicates were removed. The file names are our own: abbreviations are written out (CE RIC is Combustion Engineering and R&I Refractory and Insulation, GB is Gustin-Bacon, PPGC is Pittsburgh Plate Glass) and obvious typos are fixed.

Claude Tomplait's Social Security number appears throughout the file and has been blacked out wherever it appears. The income tax returns and W-2 forms attached to his answers to Eagle-Picher's interrogatories are not published. His answers, which list his employers and earnings year by year, are.