Olson and Olson to Dr. G. W. H. Schepers of Saranac Laboratory on the W. E. Taylor Death Claim (1956)

A four-page letter of October 18, 1956, from the law firm of Olson and Olson in Pasco, Washington, to Dr. G. W. H. Schepers, director of the Saranac Laboratory in Saranac Lake, New York. The firm represented the last employer of W. E. Taylor, an asbestos worker who died in June 1953. Washington's Department of Industrial Insurance had found that asbestosis was "a material contributing factor" in his death and had held the client liable for his widow's pension. The firm asked Schepers for an opinion on whether Taylor had contracted the disease while working for its client, and whether the client could seek contribution from his earlier employers.

What it shows

The letter sets out Taylor's working life as the employer's lawyers saw it: no "dusty" work before 1943, then work as an asbestos worker in the holds and boiler rooms of ships being built at the Vancouver, Washington, shipyards, where co-workers testified that conditions were "extremely dusty" with poor ventilation, six to seven days a week. From 1948 to 1952 he worked for the client, which moved him to the cutting room when he became short of breath and cyanotic; the material cut there was 85% magnesia with a 15% asbestos binder, which a test had identified as anthophyllite. The firm enclosed the autopsy report, the work record, a dust test it had staged at Richland, Washington, and eight chest X-rays. Schepers answered three weeks later in his medico-legal opinion.