Sears

Sears, Roebuck and Co. of Chicago was a mail-order and retail company. In our library it appears as a seller, not a maker, of asbestos products: it applied for trademarks for asbestos building material and brake lining in the 1930s, sold vinyl asbestos floor tile under its own names, and bought vinyl asbestos tile for its stores in the 1980s. Our library holds no record of an asbestos bankruptcy or trust for Sears.

Draft. The history on this page was written from the documents in our library and has not yet been reviewed by a person.

Products sold under the Sears name

Asbestos, the industry's trade journal, printed lists of trademark applications. In May 1933 it listed Sears, Roebuck and Co. of Chicago as the applicant for an "Allstate" mark, with an outline map of the United States, for asphalt roofing, asbestos building material and wallboard.² In March 1935 it listed a Sears mark, "Cross Country," for brake lining.³

A reference work of the 1980s, the Sourcebook on Asbestos Diseases, lists three Sears floor tiles as vinyl asbestos tile: Casa Viva, Starglo, and Sears Cat. No. 2292.⁴ Our library also holds a label for Sears Ready-Stick Tile; the trademark file gives first use in commerce on June 12, 1967.⁷ Neither the label nor the trademark file mentions asbestos, and no document in our library says the tile contained it.⁷

Other companies made goods for Sears. In March 1930 Johns-Manville's employee magazine reported an order for 50,000 gaskets from the Upton Machine Company of St. Joseph, for washing machines it made for Sears-Roebuck.⁸ In 1979 a Union Carbide salesman wrote that a purchasing agent at Chevron's asphalt plant in Mobile, Alabama, recalled that Chevron had once made a heavy fibered driveway sealer for Sears that contained asbestos, though its regular sealers normally did not.⁹

Sears also bought asbestos floor tile for its own stores. In April 1984 a Union Carbide call report on Kentile Floors, a buyer of Union Carbide's Calidria asbestos, said that Sears's floor tile buyer had chosen Kentile VAT (vinyl asbestos tile) for stores to be remodeled in 1984. The report says Sears based the choice on VAT wearing better and being easier to care for than non-asbestos tile.⁵ A February 1985 report says Sears was continuing to remodel all its retail stores, and that the business was expected to add to Kentile's purchases of Calidria for 1985.⁵

Brake repair shops

Sears also came up in the study of asbestos exposure in brake repair. At the Asbestos Information Association's industry-government conference in Washington in September 1975, an OSHA speaker said new NIOSH evidence from brake relining shops, at places like Sears and Wards and car companies, had shown some reasonably high levels.¹⁰ In January 1978 a friction materials industry representative recorded a meeting at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York about a NIOSH contract study of health hazards in brake repair shops. His memo says it was pointed out that New York City maintenance shops were not typical, and that shops such as Sears, Montgomery Ward and J. C. Penney would be considered more typical.¹¹

A 1951 lawsuit

In March 1951 James R. Addington, president of American Rock Wool Corp., thanked Vandiver Brown of Johns-Manville for "the help you gave us in the recent suit against Sears, Roebuck in New Hampshire."¹² Johns-Manville's own chronology describes the matter as a Sears, Roebuck trial involving rock wool products.¹²

References

1. The J-M Circle, special edition, March 20, 1929, p. 4
2. Asbestos, May 1933, p. 36
3. Asbestos, March 1935, p. 41
4. Casa Viva (Sears), product page; Starglo (Sears), product page; Sears Cat. No. 2292 (Sears), product page
5. UC-244: Calidria Customer Call Reports on Kentile Floors, Inc. (1977–1985), pp. 18, 23
6. Asbestos Trusts A–Z
7. Label: Ready-Stick Tile (Sears, Roebuck and Company)
8. The J-M Circle, March 1930, p. 19
9. UC-4545: S. E. Welsh Call Report on Chevron, Mobile, Alabama, on SG130 in Driveway Sealers (1979), p. 1
10. AIA-59: Asbestos Information Association/North America, Second Annual Industry-Government Conference Proceedings, p. 114
11. AIA-77: E. W. Drislane Memorandum of Record on the Mount Sinai Hospital Meeting on the NIOSH Brake Lining Repair Shop Contract (1978), p. 1
12. James R. Addington of American Rock Wool to Vandiver Brown on Help in a Sears, Roebuck Suit (1951)

Asbestos products

7 products our documents name Sears as making or selling. Each product's page says what the documents say about it, including its asbestos content.

• Allstate (Sears)
• Casa Viva (Sears)
• Homart (Sears)
• Ready-Stick (Sears)
• Ready-stick Tile (Sears)
• Sears Cat. No. 2292 (Sears)
• Starglo (Sears)

In our library

1 document in our library name Sears, by collection.

Other library documents (1)

• Label: Ready-Stick Tile (Sears, Roebuck and Company) (1967) (publisher)

In the Union Carbide documents

Sears is named in 2 Union Carbide documents dated 1970 to 1979 (2 mentioned), from asbestos lawsuits over Union Carbide's Calidria asbestos. All are published in our collection.

• R. E. Byrne to J. L. Myers, J. A. Riddle and F. J. Shortsleeve on Status of Program: Asbestos in Latex Paint, with Attached Jennat Technical Service Report on Standard Brands A-1 Premium Paint (1970) UC-2553 (mentioned)
• S. E. Welsh Call Report on Chevron, Mobile, Alabama, on SG130 in Driveway Sealers (1979) UC-4545 (mentioned)

Where this comes from

This page brings together every document in our library that names Sears, across collections. Titles and affiliations are taken from the documents themselves, and units and subsidiaries are grouped under the company they belong to.