A. Hughes to C. L. Sager on Mrs. De Muro (1929)

A one-line confidential memo of December 9, 1929, from A. Hughes at J-M's Manville factory to C. L. Sager, an attorney in the company's Legal Department at headquarters. "One more victim represents today's work," Hughes writes. "Mrs. De Muro sure is one hard-boiled baby, but as the saying goes - We got her." He says an enclosure covered "today's work on the lady mentioned," but the enclosure is not in this file.

What it shows

The memo does not say who Mrs. De Muro was, what Hughes's "work" was, or what it meant to have "got her." Without the enclosure it cannot show whether she was a worker, a claimant or a witness, or what was done. It does show a plant employee reporting in confidence to J-M's Legal Department on a woman he calls a "victim," in the year Anna Pirskowski sued the company over dust at the same plant (Pirskowski's suit).

In Johns-Manville's chronology

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

A. Hughes (Manville) to C.L. Sager (in-house counsel), on 12/9/29, writes "one more victim represents today's work. Mrs. DeMuro sure is one hard-boiled baby, but as the saying goes, we got her. The attached covers today's work on the lady mentioned."