J-M News Pictorial: The Archive, 1959–1972

The Johns-Manville News Pictorial was the company's picture magazine for its people. By 1968 it was called News/Pic, and its cover said it was "for the nearly 23,500 Johns-Manville employees, retirees and their families." Each issue, usually sixteen pages of photographs and short stories, reported on the plants and mines, new products, sales, safety awards, promotions and retirements. This archive holds the 114 issues we have, from March 1959 to November 1972, free to read online or download.

How to use the archive

Each year has its own page with that year's issues and an index of their articles, grouped by topic. Choose an article in the index and the issue opens at its page. The magazine never printed an index, so we compiled one from each issue's headlines and contents, under topic headings like those of our Asbestos Magazine indexes.

What the archive holds

• March 1959 to November 1972: the monthly issues we have, many of them covering two months. Some months are missing, and a few scans hold pages from a neighboring issue; each year's page says where.
• Special issues: a J-M PIX supplement on a roofing plant fire (March 3, 1960), the annual report issue of March 1970, a France issue (July 1970), a Christmas issue (1969) and an undated Colorado issue.

These copies come from Johns-Manville's own archive. Most pages carry a later stamp, "Produced JM-83."

Why it matters

These pages show what Johns-Manville told its own workers about asbestos, dust and health in the years when the dangers were becoming public. The articles that matter most are in each year's index under "Dust, Health & Safety," "Company Statements on Asbestos" and "Asbestos Mines & Fiber." Among them:

• the company's medical program, with "100,000 x-rays" on file going back to 1932 and examinations that began at the Jeffrey Mine in 1897 (February 1963);
• the company's plant medical centers and its four industrial hygiene laboratories testing the air in the plants (May 1967 and January 1968);
• dust control at the Jeffrey mill and the new Department of Environmental Control (1967–1968);
• Johns-Manville's share, with the asbestos insulation workers' union, in funding Dr. Irving Selikoff's Insulation Industry Hygiene Research Program at Mount Sinai Hospital, announced October 14, 1968 (see Selikoff Studies);
• the plans for the Coalinga asbestos mine in California (February 1961) and new mines in Newfoundland and Ontario.

The 1983 history Manville wrote for its later employee paper, Today, is in the Library as "125 Proud Years". For what Johns-Manville knew about asbestos and health, and when, see the Johns-Manville Knowledge Chronology.

Rights

From the Johns-Manville corporate archive. Republished under fair use for research and historical study.