Johns-Manville Sales Searches and Printouts for Mobil Oil (1978–1990)

A 59-page set of Johns-Manville legal-department memos and computer sales printouts gathered for asbestos lawsuits about Mobil Oil plants. It opens with 1978 and 1982 printouts of J-M sales to Mobil at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and continues with memos: Dennis Markusson's February 1, 1978, request, for the Cipressi v. Johns-Manville case, for asbestos insulation sold to Mobil's refinery at Paulsboro, New Jersey; Barbara Diemer's February 22, 1978, answer that the records showed no shipments to Paulsboro and small sales from 1975 to 1976 of Thermo-12, Flame-Safe, Zeston fittings and Insulkote, of which she understood only Insulkote contained asbestos (6.7% to 15%, depending on grade); and a December 14, 1981, memo in which D. Knott passes on what retired district manager Tom Williams recalled about sales to New Jersey refineries. The rest are printouts run in 1982 and 1990 of sales to Mobil locations in Michigan, New Jersey and Texas, and to Mobil Chemical.

What it shows

Tom Williams's account is the fullest piece. He recalled that Mobil's Paulsboro refinery, earlier the Socony Vacuum Oil Company's, did "a large amount of new construction and remodeling" around 1950, which gave J-M "a large number of sales," directly and through contractors and J-M's own contract units, and that "J-M and Owens-Corning shared the largest percentage of sales to the refinery." At the nearby Texaco refinery in Westville, built around 1955, J-M sold "fairly copious quantities of insulating materials," with Pittsburgh Corning, Ruberoid, Ehret-Magnesia, Baldwin-Ehret-Hill and perhaps Keasbey & Mattison and Philip Carey also selling there. The computer records, which begin in 1972, show far less: a few hundred dollars a year at most to most Mobil locations, and $102,690 of expansion joints to Mobil Chemical in 1974. The gap between the two is a reminder that J-M's computerized sales records reached back only to 1972.