J. P. Stevens & Co.

J. P. Stevens & Co. was a large American textile maker. In its account as The Travelers Insurance Company compiled it for a 1980 seminar, it said it made asbestos-containing fabrics from 1957 to 1973, mainly for firefighting garments, electrical uses and ironing board covers, and it gave its plants as Slater and Greenville, South Carolina.¹ It also listed fabric contracts with Long Beach Naval Shipyard.² The library holds no record of an asbestos bankruptcy or trust for the company.

A textile company

J. P. Stevens was best known for sheets, towels and other household and apparel fabrics. Other companies' records show its mills at work. A 1961 issue of Johns-Manville's employee magazine shows looms at "the Slater, S. C., mill of J. P. Stevens and Company" weaving J-M's Garan glass-fiber roving for boat builders.³ Union Carbide's annual report for 1966 says J. P. Stevens brought out a line of blankets made from Union Carbide's Dynel fiber.⁴

Asbestos fabrics

Nearly all the library knows about J. P. Stevens and asbestos comes from a short data sheet in a binder that The Travelers Insurance Company's claim department put together for a March 1980 asbestos seminar. The sheets in the binder were drawn mostly from defendants' answers to interrogatories in the Long Beach Naval Shipyard suits, and the binder warns that some answers may be self-serving. What follows is the company's account as Travelers recorded it, not an established fact.

The sheet says J. P. Stevens claimed never to have made an asbestos fabric suitable for marine insulation.¹ Its asbestos products had no trade names, only style numbers. It made them from 1957 to 1973, with 40 to 55% asbestos, and they were used mainly for firefighting garments, electrical substrates and ironing board covers.¹ The company did not mine or mill asbestos, and it gave its plants as Slater and Greenville, South Carolina.¹ It stopped the products for "Lack of business."¹

The sheet gives total sales from 1957 to March 1973 as $316,240.¹ It says the company sold 15 yards of cloth to H. K. Porter in August 1965 and was not party to any relabeling agreement.¹ It gives the company's first knowledge of hazards as May 5, 1969, through a Department of the Navy document addressed to Owens-Corning Fiberglas, and says its products were "Never Labeled."¹ The company was not a member of the Asbestos Textile Institute and reported no workers' compensation claims.¹ In the same binder, Atlas Asbestos Company's answers say it had no record of any sales to J.P. Stevens.⁵

Long Beach Naval Shipyard contracts

The sheet says J. P. Stevens denied direct sales to the U.S. Government. It refers to an attached exhibit for sales to Long Beach Naval Shipyard between March 1971 and May 14, 1976.¹ That exhibit is an internal J. P. Stevens memo of October 10, 1978, from W. J. Stafford at Slater to John Cobianchi in New York.² It lists "all of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard contracts that we could locate".² The three-page table that follows gives each order's fabric style number, contract number, date, customer order number and quantity, in yards, square feet or rolls.²⁶⁷ The listed orders run from March 4, 1971, to May 14, 1976.²⁷ The memo does not say which of the styles, if any, contained asbestos. The data sheet's own dates for asbestos products end in 1973.¹

In the courts

J. P. Stevens was a defendant in Fusco v. Johns-Manville Products Corp. (5th Cir. 1981), a suit by a Long Beach Naval Shipyard pipe coverer against Johns-Manville and other makers. The Fifth Circuit held that the suit had been filed too late.⁸ It was also named with many other asbestos makers in Staiano v. Johns-Manville Corp. (Pa. Super. 1982), a Philadelphia Naval Shipyard case decided on the same ground.⁹ In Swogger v. Waterman SS Corp. (N.Y. App. Div. 1989), it was a third-party defendant in a seaman's case that the shipowners had settled.¹⁰

The library has no trust page for J. P. Stevens, and none of these records mentions an asbestos bankruptcy.

References

1. Travelers Asbestos Seminar Booklet (1980): J.P. Stevens Product Information, p. 2
2. Travelers Asbestos Seminar Booklet (1980): J.P. Stevens Product Information, p. 4
3. J-M News Pictorial, July–August 1961, p. 17
4. UC-1039: Union Carbide Corporation Annual Report for 1966 (1967), p. 22
5. Travelers Asbestos Seminar Booklet (1980): Atlas Asbestos Company Product Information, p. 9
6. Travelers Asbestos Seminar Booklet (1980): J.P. Stevens Product Information, p. 5
7. Travelers Asbestos Seminar Booklet (1980): J.P. Stevens Product Information, p. 6
8. Fusco v. Johns-Manville Products Corp. (5th Cir. 1981)
9. Staiano v. Johns-Manville Corp. (Pa. Super. 1982)
10. Swogger v. Waterman SS Corp. (N.Y. App. Div. 1989)