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).

The same day's papers in another file suggest who she was. Angelina DeMuro Graziosi had sued J-M in September 1929 over the death of her son, Michael DeMuro, a Manville plant worker, and on December 9, 1929, J-M's investigator took a question-and-answer statement from her through an Italian interpreter. That statement is in the court papers published as Graziosi v. Johns-Manville, Wrongful Death Suit for Michael DeMuro (1929) (Motley 1000), and it is probably the "today's work" Hughes enclosed. The memo itself does not name the case, so the link rests on the name and the date. Her suit was settled and discontinued in 1934.

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."