Vandiver Brown to C. B. Belknap on the New Jersey Rock Wool Silicosis Transcripts (1933)

Three short letters from Vandiver Brown, Johns-Manville's attorney, to C. B. Belknap, a lawyer in Toledo, Ohio, who by 1940 was a vice-president of the Owens-Illinois Glass Company. On June 21, 1933, Brown lent Belknap his only copies of the court's charge in two "Silicosis" actions in the New Jersey courts, Lynch v. Home Insulation Company and Poppell v. Joseph Dixon Crucible Co. He asked for them back in October 1933, and again on November 18, 1940, when he described them as two silicosis actions "involving the use of Rock Wool."

What it shows

The file includes the Lynch transcript: the Essex County Circuit Court trial of May 1933 in which William Lynch, who had blown and hand-packed rock wool insulation into the walls of houses, claimed his employer had failed to protect him from the dust and to warn him of it. The judge refused to take the case from the jury, and charged that an employer who knew or should have known of a dust danger had a duty to warn the worker and keep the dust under control. These appear to be the Home Insulation suits that Brown reported in May 1933 had been decided for the defendant (his memo on the Home Insulation dust cases). The letters show J-M's attorney sharing dust-disease trial material with a lawyer who by 1940 was an officer of Owens-Illinois.

In Johns-Manville's chronology

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

On 6/21/33, Vandiver Brown sent to C.B. Belknap, Esq. (Owens-Illinois Glass Co.) copies of the Court's charge and certain other materials in two silicosis cases (Lynch v. Home Insulation Company and Poppell v. Joseph Dixon Crucible Co.) filed in NJ. On 10/2/33, Brown asked for the return of these materials. Brown renewed his request on 11/18/40.