Johns-Manville Sales Record Searches for Shell Oil in Petty v. Johns-Manville and McClarnon v. J-M (1977–1990)

A 40-page file of Johns-Manville memos and computer printouts from searches of its sales records for lawsuits, mostly about sales to Shell Oil Company. For Petty v. Johns-Manville (1977–78), a suit by a Shell worker in Deer Park, Texas, J-M's Houston salesmen reported that Shell bought J-M insulation through a distributor, J. T. Thorpe Company, and that during 1960 to 1973 it bought "Thermobestos pipe insulation and block. 450 cement and 375 cement," along with Pittsburgh Corning's Unibestos and Owens-Corning's Kaylo from other distributors. The file ends with Manville sales printouts of July 1990 covering its Industrial Products Division sales to Shell Chemical and others from 1972 to 1989.

What it shows

The memos show how the company's legal department answered product identification questions: by asking its sales offices who handled an account, what they remembered selling, and what the records showed. One salesman's April 1977 memo answers the three questions directly; Barbara Diemer's June 1978 memo to D. H. Markusson lists J-M's Houston distributors and notes that Shell "bought other products manufactured by Fibreboard Corporation, Owens-Corning, Ruberoid, Keene and Pittsburg Corning." An August 1979 request for McClarnon v. J-M asks for sales to Ohio and other insulation contractors, power plants and a refinery, with handwritten results. The 1990 printouts list products such as Thermobestos blocks and Flame-Safe by customer and year.

About this copy

Two copies of a February 21, 1977, memo listing the salesmen who handled the Shell account (pages 9 and 16) are left out because someone added the home addresses of three of them by hand.