Johns-Manville Legal Department File on Its Industrial Advertising Managers and Agencies (1976–1985)

A 55-page Johns-Manville legal department work file, from December 1976 to 1985, gathered to answer plaintiffs' discovery about J-M's advertising of its asbestos insulation. It opens with a December 6, 1976 memo from R. H. Feeney to Kip Johnson naming J-M's industrial insulation advertising managers since 1970 and its advertising agencies: Cunningham & Walsh from the mid-1950s to 1970, then Warner, Bicking & Fenwick, Campbell-Mithun, and from 1973 Broyles, Allebaugh & Davis. It goes on with a list of sales literature on asbestos insulations with issue dates, draft interrogatory answers, handwritten lawyers' notes, a 1981 letter from J-M's Virginia counsel about plaintiffs' notice to depose the advertising agencies, deposition notices, and a 1985 response on Thermobestos advertising for Navy use with 1984 document production logs.

What it shows

The file shows how little of J-M's old advertising record was left when the lawsuits came. Draft answers say that advertising records for the period before 1973 "are no longer in existence, the same having been destroyed in the regular course of business," and handwritten lawyers' notes from early 1981 record that the records from before 1973 had been destroyed. A December 1980 note of a call with someone in J-M's advertising department says J-M generally advertised on a national basis, not state by state. A typed note records that J-M's board minutes of December 23, 1930 show a change of advertising agency from W. L. Brann, Inc. to J. Walter Thompson Co.

About this copy

Most pages carry "Privileged J-M 83" or "Redacted J-M 83" stamps. Page 11, a handwritten note of two retired employees' home addresses and telephone numbers from about 1981, is left out for privacy. The production logs at the end list the names of the people who reviewed document boxes in 1984.