Johns-Manville Loan Agreements and Notes with Metropolitan Life and Mutual Life (1947)

Papers on a $25 million line of credit that Johns-Manville arranged in July 1947 with Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and The Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. They include J-M's loan agreement letter of July 10, 1947, to Mutual Life, signed by Vice President Alvin Brown, and J-M's 20-year notes of July 15, 1947, for $4,000,000 to Metropolitan Life and $1,000,000 to Mutual Life at 2.7 percent. A page from J-M's 1947 annual report says the company had borrowed $5 million, with $20 million more available, to "undertake new improvements of product and process."

What it shows

Metropolitan Life was not only J-M's lender. Through Dr. Anthony Lanza and its industrial hygiene staff, it had studied dust and disease in J-M's plants since the early 1930s (see Vandiver Brown's comments on the Lanza study in 1934), and in January 1947 it was again taking dust counts at the Manville factory (Begert's memo). These papers show the two companies also tied together by a large long-term loan.

In Johns-Manville's chronology

Johns-Manville's own chronology of what the company knew describes this document as follows:

On 7/15/47, J-M enters into two loan agreements with Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and Mutual Life Insurance Company in an effort to obtain funding for completion of a capital expenditure program which included "projects urgently required for safety and health . . . ."

Editor's note: J-M's description quotes the loans as funding "projects urgently required for safety and health." That phrase is not in this file. The agreement refers to a prospectus of February 28, 1947, which is not included.