How Ball Brothers Got the Plant

Charles R. Tips told the story the same way for twenty years. He had a Reconstruction Finance Corporation loan nearly in hand; he needed the holders of the first mortgage notes to subordinate to it; he paid a San Antonio attorney five hundred dollars to go and get that agreement; and the attorney instead delivered the notes to Ball Brothers, who foreclosed. “The glass trust found out about this and through a crooked attorney, Ball Brothers purchased these first mortgage notes and would not agree to the loan” [@ev-0041, Tips to Lindholm, October 11, 1971].

Until now this expert could say only that Tips said so, and that Michael David Smith’s 1989 book repeated it from Tips-derived material [ev-0039]. The commissioned extract of the transcript of record in Hartford-Empire Co. v. United States changes that [ev-0059]. The record contains the attorney’s own letters, the licensor’s internal memoranda, and the sworn examination of Hartford-Empire’s secretary, produced under subpoena and written years before Tips wrote anything down.

They do not vindicate him in every particular. They vindicate him in the particulars that matter, and they are worse than his account in places he never knew about.

The license Three Rivers was refused before it was granted

Three Rivers had asked Hartford-Empire for feeders around 1926 and been turned down. The minutes of the licensing discussion that reversed that decision are in the record. “The Three Rivers Glass Company of Texas is renewing its application for Hartford’s single feeders. This is a small company. Their previous request of about three years ago was turned down but Hartford questions the wisdom of that refusal and feels now that it would be wise to grant the license.” Mr. Peiler’s reasoning was that “the freight rate situation made it inevitable that glass would be independently manufactured in such remote localities,” so the royalties “might better be coming into Hartford’s divisible income, than left for outsiders to enjoy” — provided Three Rivers “pay a substantial sum for back damages” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 59792].

That is the whole logic of the arrangement in one paragraph. A remote plant was going to make glass whether licensed or not; better to license it and collect, and to charge for the years it had gone unlicensed.

The same minute records the objection from inside the licensee group. Carter “remarked on the fact that the objections of the Illinois Glass Company were not alone to the use of the feeder by rank outsiders but to the engineering service given by Hartford, which enabled people who had previously been dubs in the business, under Hartford’s guidance to become good glass manufacturers and serious competitors” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 59792].

Hartford was also steering capital away from Three Rivers in the same period. In October 1928 its president wrote to H. C. Mandeville of Thatcher Manufacturing: “Personally, I do not think Thatcher could safely join Tips, and I do not think you would better the situation. I think you would upset the other manufacturers… At this time I do not want to commit myself to any definite answer about giving Three Rivers a license” [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1243, part 16, fol. 60710]. Tips was still trying eighteen months later, writing to Mandeville on Three Rivers Glass Company letterhead about securing “the license to use the Hartford Empire feeder on our milk machine unit” [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 845, part 16, fol. 60139].

The license came in August 1929, restricted to beverage bottles and packers’ and prescription ware [ev-0042]. By the end of that December Hartford was already recording Three Rivers among licensees showing “actions of a most demoralizing character” [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 583, part 16, fol. 59692].

What the industry actually complained about

The grievance was not abstract. It arrives in the record as sales reports.

In March 1933 an interoffice letter out of Dallas, subject line “Three Rivers,” reported that the company was “now offering a regular packers jars in Pint and Quart sizes either Round or Square equipped with two piece screw cap to jobbers in the Sherman district. The price offered on the Quarts being $6.35 complete delivered and the price on the Pints $5.50. If they do this generally in Texas it will certainly affect our fruit jar business this coming year” [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 945, part 16, fol. 60283].

Two months later, in a memorandum to J. H. McNash headed “Re: Three Rivers Glass Co.,” W. H. Marsh set out the whole complaint:

“These people are very active in Texas, going to the wholesale grocery trade all over that State and selling plain pint and quart jars, without caps, to be used by the wholesale grocers in connection with fruit jar closures bought from Bernardin or Crown Cork and Seal; thus [making] fruit jars to the detriment of the legitimate fruit jar industry… the prices at which Three Rivers’ jars, pints and quarts, are selling, plus what they have to pay for two-piece Bernardin or Crown Caps, are so much lower than the Ball list on fruit jars as to make the situation almost impossible for the legitimate fruit jar manufacturer. So that, the Three Rivers Company, being a Hartford licensee, should be prevented in some way from misusing their license in the way they are now doing.”

[@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 948, part 16, fol. 60285]

Whose complaint this is. Both letters carry the printed designation “Hartford-Empire Co.—804,” and neither is Hartford’s. The March letter is headed interoffice and runs from Dallas to “Hazel-Atlas Glass Co., Wheeling, W. Va., Attention—Mr. Meyn” [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 945, part 16, fol. 60283]. The May memorandum is an officer reporting to his own president, signed “Vice-Pres. & Gen’l. Sales Mgr.” [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 948, part 16, fol. 60285]. The memorandum next in the same series is datelined Wheeling [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 949, part 16, fol. 60286], and the fruit-jar shipment table between them counts Hazel-Atlas as one of the three makers with a direct stake in the trade being complained of, beside Ball Brothers and Owens-Illinois [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 947, part 16, fol. 60284]. The firm making the complaint is Hazel-Atlas, and it made it to the licensor because the licence, not the market, was the instrument that could stop Three Rivers.

That the May memorandum is Marsh’s rests on the dictation initials “WHM-FHH” and the two-month interval; its signature line reads “Yours very truly, ————, Vice-Pres. & Gen’l. Sales Mgr.” with the name lost to the OCR. And the identification of the firm is read off the documents rather than off the file they sit in — a distinction this expert got wrong once already, on a different letter in this same exhibit series, and corrected in the timeline.

The mechanism is named in the last sentence: not competition, but the license. An exhibit table in the same series shows why it mattered — of domestic fruit jars shipped in the United States, Ball Brothers accounted for between 51 and 59 percent of the industry total in seven of the eight rows where both its figure and the total survive the scan [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 947, part 16, fol. 60284].

What the licence actually permitted. Hartford’s own tabulated register of its licences, printed in the record as a defendant’s exhibit, sets out the ware field granted to each licensee. The Three Rivers entry survives with its left margin shaved by the scan, and reads: “[Three R]ivers Glass Co. - Three Rivers, Tex. / [bever]ages, [pa]ckers, proprietary and [m]iscellaneous ([she]llacs, shoe polishes and bluing), pressure, beers, still waters, liquors, fruit juices” [@ev-0059, part 18, line 67552]. Packers’ ware is there. Domestic fruit jars are not — and that class was one the compiler had to hand, because the entry immediately below, for Illinois Pacific Coast, ends “domestic fruit jars” in those words. Marsh’s charge is legible against that line. Three Rivers was selling, within its licence, the packers’ jars the licence allowed, to buyers who closed them into the fruit jars the licence withheld. That is what “misusing their license” meant, and it is why the complaint went to the licensor and not to a court.

Two cautions about that document. Its exhibit number survives only as “EXHIBIT No. H-5—” and its title line only as ”…NSE 1916 TO 19..”, so it is identified here by what it does rather than by its designation. And the Three Rivers entry does contain “fruit juices,” which is a beverage class and not a jar, and is easy to misread as the thing it is not.

This reframes the fruit-jar question. The Bottle Research Group’s account has Three Rivers inaugurating fruit-jar production in 1928 outside its license scope, with Ball sending repeated notices demanding it stop [ev-0042]. The record shows the demands and shows something the compiled accounts did not: Three Rivers’ answer, and that the industry’s own correspondence concedes the facts of it. Marsh describes plain jars sold without caps to grocers, who bought closures elsewhere. In January 1935 Hartford’s president wrote to Frank C. Ball, replying to Ball’s complaint about Mason jars reaching the Griffin Grocery Co., and recounted what the receiver had said when summoned to Hartford:

“Coquat claimed that under no conditions had [he] manufactured fruit jars for the domestic trade—showed us letters in which he had declined to manufacture fruit jars for the domestic trade—but did admit that on orders received from one or two packers he had supplied a straight line jar with a screw top thread. His position then was that the packers had ordered these jars as far as he knew for packing purposes, and that if any of them had gone out and bought caps, and had then sold the jars and the caps as a domestic fruit jar, such action was beyond his control.”

[@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 203, part 16, fol. 59030]

That is, to the word, the defence the plant’s chief chemist gave under oath seven years later: “fruit-packers ware, one trip container; they weren’t Mason type jars,” and “I think Mr. Ball said they did” sell them for use as fruit jars [ev-0059]. Two witnesses, independently, giving the same answer.

And in the same letter Hartford told Ball what it would do about it: “if the Court demands that we re-instate our license agreement with the re-organized company we will make every attempt to write into that license agreement with Three Rivers Glass Co. that they will not make jars with the Mason finish and seal. We can not guarantee that we will be successful in this undertaking, but we will certainly use all our influence to see that the license is changed to this extent” [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 203, part 16, fol. 59030].

The licensor promising the largest fruit-jar maker in the country that it would use all its influence to write a competitor out of the fruit-jar business is not folklore. It is a letter.

Cancellation, suit, and four years of receivership

Arthur T. Safford Jr., Hartford-Empire’s secretary and counsel, gave the sequence under oath in a single narrative answer:

“In July, 1932, was the first time which we sent cancelation notice to the Three Rivers Glass Company. And then we filed suit against them on October 21, 1932, in the United States District Court at Corpus Christi. Subsequent to our filing suit the first mortgage bondholders had a receiver appointed in the State court…”

[@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10221]

The rest of the sequence follows from his examination. Henderson Coquat, mayor of Three Rivers and manager of the local gas company, was the state-court receiver [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10178]. Hartford took a consent decree in the federal suit giving it “repossession of the [machinery] and judgment for the license fees due, royalties due” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10181], then relicensed Coquat under a supplementary agreement of June 21, 1933 approved by the court [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10182]. A 77-B petition put the company into federal reorganization under a second receiver, Chamberlain, until the petition was dismissed in March or April 1935; a Texas state reorganization statute was then used until it “was declared unconstitutional” in the fall of 1935; a second 77-B petition moved the assets back to the federal court at Corpus Christi — the third time, the judge observed, that the matter had been in federal court [@ev-0059, part 09, fols. 10221-10224]. Coquat “was out completely by that time” [@ev-0059, part 09, line 9433].

Hartford was never paid what it was owed from before the receivership: a debt of $6,915.20 that Safford agreed “must be taken as a loss,” and “We never collected it” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10184]. By October 1936 its claim stood at $14,357.53 from Coquat’s operation and $17,532.72 from Chamberlain’s — a total of $31,890.25, on which it received forty percent and no more [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10218].

Two details from this stretch deserve their own note. Hartford’s internal position, recorded the day Coquat spent at Hartford in April 1933, was stated in three numbered points, the first of which reads: “We did not wish to license Three Rivers at all” [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 482, part 16, fol. 59558]. And Coquat did not accept that quietly. A Hartford letter to Searcy marked “Confidential” records: “Rumor has reached us that Mr. Coquat, when leaving Hartford, went to Washington where he is supposed to have seen Mr. Garner, who referred him to the Department of Justice, all with a view toward preventing our cancellation of the Three Rivers licenses and leases” [@ev-0059, Defs. Ex. H-5708, part 18, fol. 63454]. Hartford later withheld a circular from Three Rivers for that reason: “I sent no letter to Three Rivers Glass Company. Our reason for this is mainly on account of Coquat’s conversations with the Government at Washington” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60458].

The receiver of a small Texas glass plant went to the Vice President of the United States and was sent to the Department of Justice. Nothing held says what came of it, and the antitrust suit was still six years away — but Three Rivers was talking to the Government about the glass trust long before the Government sued it.

Hartford proposed Ball as the buyer

The single most important thing the record establishes about motive is not the 1936 letter everyone quotes. It is Safford’s answer about 1933 and 1934.

“Q. Well, we knew Coquat had been dealing with Ball Brothers, hoping that he could sell the plant to Ball Brothers. Q. Well, did Hartford have anything to do with that? If so, what — A. Well, as I say, I think we may have suggested Ball Brothers as a possible purchaser for that particular plant. Q. Ball Brothers wasn’t the only glass manufacturer you suggested as a possible purchaser, was it? A. No, I think we also suggested General Glass Company.”

[@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10186]

He denied fixing a price: “Did you make any attempt to fix the price in any way? A. Oh, no” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10186]. Hartford’s confidential letter to Searcy sets out the alternative plan in the same period: Coquat was to approach Collins of Liberty Glass and possibly General Glass, “to get either Company to buy the glassware manufactured by Three Rivers at agreed prices, or else to take over all licenses and leases and operate the Three Rivers plant” [@ev-0059, Defs. Ex. H-5708, part 18, fol. 63454]. Hartford’s preference was stated plainly to Searcy in September 1934: “Generally speaking, we would prefer to have Three Rivers taken over by someone already in the business, and would prefer not, if possible, to have new people in the business” [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1197, part 16, fol. 60654].

That same letter shows Hartford timing its own legal pressure around Ball’s negotiations:

“We ourselves talked with Mr. Ball today, and according to him, the present plan contemplates his seeing Mr. Coquat on Friday… My reaction, following your letter, was to send you a notice of revocation to be given to Mr. Coquat so that it would take effect thirty days hence. As a result, however, of the conversation with Mr. Ball we will not do so for a few days at least until we learn a little more as to how things are progressing.”

[@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1197, part 16, fol. 60654]

This must be set against Safford’s testimony. Asked in court whether the September 1936 Church letter was his first notice that Ball–receiver negotiations had reopened, he said yes; asked “There had been no discussion or dealing or transaction between Ball Brothers and Hartford respecting the matter prior to that time?” he answered “I don’t believe so, no” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10216]. Exhibit 1197 is a Hartford letter reporting a conversation with Mr. Ball about the Three Rivers deal, two years earlier. The question may have been meant to reach only the reopened 1936 negotiations, and Safford may have so understood it. The document and the answer are both in the record; this expert does not resolve them, and notes that no held source shows the contradiction being put to the witness.

Hartford also had the licences held over the plant while the sale was pending, and said so internally. On 16 August 1934 A. M. Pease wrote to a colleague, copy to Safford, about Three Rivers having made brilliantines on Single Feeder No. 295 and checked them as toilet ware — the correct classification, “but they have not the right in their Field of Permitted Ware to make ‘Toilets’.” What Hartford decided to do about it is the whole point:

“We are going to overlook this production for the time being inasmuch as this plant may be sold very shortly to another licensee. If it is not sold we expect to terminate their licenses completely.”

[@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1289, part 16, fols. 60789-60791]

That is dated two months before the first Ball deal collapsed. A licence violation Hartford would ordinarily have acted on was being carried, expressly, because the plant was expected to change hands — and the stated alternative, if it did not, was to end the licences and with them the plant’s ability to operate at all.

The first Ball deal died in the autumn of 1934. Safford: negotiations “had completely stopped,” from “a combination of the inability of Ball Brothers and Coquat to get together on the price, and also… Mr. Tips blocking the deal by taking the matter [into the federal reorganization]” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10198].

Church shopped the company to the majors

In November 1935 — ten months before the letter that names Ball, and a year before the sale — William C. Church wrote to Owens-Illinois:

“As attorneys for the Bondholders’ Committee, holding $123,500.00, par value, of an outstanding issue of $124,900.00 of bonds of the Three Rivers Glass Company of Three Rivers, Texas, we would like to know whether or not you would be interested in purchasing for yourselves or joining other glass companies in the purchase of these bonds at a substantial discount in order to attempt to acquire, by purchase through the Receiver, the glass plant, rights, good will and trade territory of Three Rivers Glass Company… Please hold this matter in strict confidence and do not, in any manner, let the inquiry be conveyed to the Three Rivers Glass Company or its receiver.”

[@ev-0059, Defs. Ex. O-6082, part 18, fol. 64126]

Church’s committee held 98.9 percent of the bond issue by par value. He was offering the plant, its goodwill and its trade territory to a competitor at a discount, and asking that his own client’s company not be told.

Owens-Illinois refused, two days later and without qualification: “this company is not interested now or at any other time in purchasing, either individually or in conjunction with anyone else, the Three Rivers Glass Company or any other glass bottle company or the bonds or other interest in such glass company” [@ev-0059, Defs. Ex. O-6083, part 18, fol. 64127].

Tips named Owens-Illinois among the companies that destroyed him [@ev-0041, Tips to Lindholm, October 11, 1971]. On this document Owens-Illinois was offered the chance and declined it flatly. That correction runs against Tips and should be recorded as such.

Two letters, two days apart

On September 12, 1936, Church wrote to the Receiver’s creditors. The letter tells them a great deal and withholds one thing:

“We represent a party interested in purchasing the plant of the Three Rivers Glass Company, held by the Receiver… Let it be understood that we do not solicit any professional employment whatsoever, but are representing the prospective purchaser of the properties of the Receivership… We represent the largest single creditor of the Receiver in the form of the First Mortgage Gold Notes, and the lien securing the same.”

[@ev-0059, Defs. Ex. H-5743, part 18, fol. 63510]

The creditors were told the receivership was insolvent, that its books overstated its assets, that $8,984.91 of their money was already gone and $14,000 more was about to go into rebuilding the tank, and that they should deposit their claims with the trustee by September 26 and take forty percent. They were also told who to blame: “the Receiver’s assets could have been sold on two former occasions, at which time the Receiver’s creditors could have received 100% of their claim, but the sale was blocked by the same parties that will attempt to do so again” — the former officers of the company [@ev-0059, part 18, line 66509].

Two days later, on Church & Steger letterhead — the same San Antonio address, rendered “Milan Building” in this exhibit and “Milam Building” in the 1935 one [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1200; Defs. Ex. O-6082] — he wrote privately to S. S. Searcy:

“While we do not want it generally known, and ask that you and your clients keep the information confidential, the prospective purchaser that we represent is Mr. George A. Ball of Muncie, Indiana. He has asked us to get you and the Hartford Empire Company to assist him in purchasing the Three Rivers plant, and not doing anything about the new licensing agreement should he become the purchaser, until after he has obtained the plant and continues the operation.”

[@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1200, part 16, fol. 60658]

Searcy was Hartford-Empire’s Texas attorney, retained to collect the Three Rivers account and pursue its equipment [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10177]. The retainer dates to at least August 1932: TNEC Exhibit No. 123 prints the same letter that the transcript carries as Exhibit 1786, in which Safford described Three Rivers to Searcy as “a perpetual thorn in the side of all the manufacturing companies” [ev-0067]. So on September 12 the creditors were asked to sell their claims to an undisclosed buyer at forty cents, and on September 14 the buyer’s identity was given, in confidence, to the largest creditor’s lawyer — with a request that the licensor hold off on the licensing question until the purchase was done.

Hartford moved at once. On September 17 Safford wrote to Searcy: “I have just talked over the phone with Mr. Smith who is in New York and who apparently talked with Mr. George Ball. Mr. Smith suggests that in addition to the above you try to get the receiver to agree that the machinery is our property and should be returned to us” [@ev-0059, Defs. Ex. H-5742, part 18, fol. 63509].

November 27, 1936

Two things happened that day, and only one of them is in the compiled histories.

The property was sold to Guardian Loan Company, Trustee, with the confirmation hearing held in the District Court at George West, Texas, on notice to all parties at interest [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10219]. And the same court, on Hartford-Empire’s application filed May 27, 1935, entered an order granting Hartford “the right of possession of said machines and equipment… and permission to take possession of and remove said machines and equipment from the manufacturing plant of Three Rivers Glass Company at Three Rivers, Texas” [@ev-0059, part 18, line 66821].

Ball bought the plant on the day the court ordered the feeders out of it.

Hartford’s own license history records the transaction in five words: “11/27/36 – Three Rivers – acquired by Ball” [@ev-0059, part 18, line 68242]. Safford’s summary agrees: “in the Fall of 1936 the negotiations commenced between the Three Rivers Glass Company and the Ball Glass Company, or some of its representatives, and the creditors were asked to take forty percent of their claims. That was done. Hartford-Empire Company, as one of the creditors, received forty per cent of its claim, and the plant was sold, I believe, to Ball Glass Corporation” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10221].

The Bottle Research Group, working from Roller’s files and the trade yearbooks, independently gives November 27, 1936 as the date the property passed to Ball [ev-0042]. Smith’s “In 1937, the Ball Brothers closed the transaction” [ev-0039] is best read as the paperwork year; the licensor’s ledger, the court record and the trade research all put the acquisition in November 1936.

The sale price is not in the extract. BRG reports an auction with Ball bidding $80,000 [ev-0042]; the record describes not an auction but a creditors’ composition at forty percent followed by a trustee’s sale. A period newspaper — the San Antonio Evening News of December 5, 1936 — reports the reorganisation under the headline “Three Rivers Glass Plant Reorganized,” naming Church and L. L. Bracken and giving $130,000 for the transaction, against BRG’s $80,000 [ev-0066]. Neither figure is in the trial record.

What Ball did with it

Ball Glass Corporation operated the plant at Three Rivers into 1937 under a manager the receivership had already been using: R. A. Ellerman, listed by BRG as agent for the receiver in 1933 [ev-0042], signs as “Manager, Ball Glass Corporation, Three Rivers, Texas” in July 1937 [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1211, part 16, fol. 60669]. His letters up the chain that summer are complaints that competitors were quoting below the understanding — Capstan and Hazel-Atlas pricing “modernistic jars the same price as their pantry jars,” and Owens-Illinois’ quotation to a coffee packer in Oklahoma City [@ev-0059, Gov. Exs. 1211, 1213, part 16, fols. 60669, 60671]. The plant that had been the industry’s price cutter spent its last operating summer reporting price cutters.

Then it stopped. George A. Ball, to Hartford: “Three Rivers is a subsidiary of Ball Brothers Company… As you know, Three Rivers has not been operated since December—We are operating at Wichita Falls” [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1208, part 16, fol. 60667]. His explanation, in July 1938: “The Three Rivers plant and equipment was [purchased] from the receiver. It was in due time closed down for repairs and at the time those repairs were completed there was not enough business in that section to make possible the operation of both Three Rivers and Wichita Falls” [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1210, part 16, fol. 60668].

A Hartford internal note of July 28, 1938 puts it less diplomatically. Reporting on efforts to get Hartford feeders back onto a Ball furnace, and on how a Hartford letter about lehr license fees at Three Rivers had set Frank C. Ball off, the writer observes: “Ball Bros. know they bought a pile of junk when they bought Three Rivers and at present never expect to open it up. It has just so happened that every time Addie thought he was doing okay then something comes up about Three Rivers and F. C. blows a fuse the first thing” [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1227, part 16, fol. 60688].

Two readings of the shutdown sit in the record side by side, and the expert holds both. Tips: “their only purpose in taking over the factory had been to eliminate the competition from Three Rivers Glass Company” [ev-0041]. And the Government’s charge, in the pleadings: “(5) Ball Brothers acquired and shut down and is continuing to keep closed the plant of Three Rivers Glass Company, its principal competitor in the State of Texas” [@ev-0059, part 18, fol. 64374]. The count immediately before it reads: “Ball Brothers has induced Hartford to refuse to license existing manufacturers of glass containers, and other companies seeking to enter the field, to make fruit jars” [@ev-0059, part 18, fol. 64374] — the general form of what Exhibit 203 shows Hartford promising Ball about this particular plant. Against that, Ball’s own two explanations — regional overcapacity, and a plant its owners privately called junk. Overcapacity was real: Hartford’s assistant treasurer, asked in the same period about Texas, reckoned that Ball operating Wichita Falls and Three Rivers plus Liberty operating Santa Anna “would be more than enough output to care for the Texas market” [@ev-0059, part 18, line 3315]. Nothing held decides between purpose and consequence.

A third count in the same list is about the ware itself. Three counts after the shutdown charge, the Government pleaded that “Ball Brothers caused Hartford to prevent its licensees from selling packers ware as fruit jars” [@ev-0059, part 18, fol. 64374]. That is the practice this article has been describing from the other end and from inside one plant. Hazel-Atlas asked Hartford to stop Three Rivers “misusing their license”; Frank C. Ball reported Three Rivers jars reaching the trade as Mason fruit jars; Hartford replied that it would try to write a no-Mason-finish clause into any licence a reorganized Three Rivers might get. The count says who was behind that policy and calls it a restraint of trade. It names no plant — Three Rivers has its own count five — so this is the general rule and not a finding about this company. But the general rule is the one the Three Rivers correspondence shows being applied, to this plant, by name, five years before the pleading was filed.

Tips, measured against the record

• “Ball Brothers purchased these first mortgage notes.” Substantially correct. Church’s circular says he represented “the largest single creditor of the Receiver in the form of the First Mortgage Gold Notes” and was acting for the prospective purchaser; his private letter names that purchaser as George A. Ball [@ev-0059, Defs. Ex. H-5743; Gov. Ex. 1200]. Tips did not know that Church had first offered the same bonds to Owens-Illinois.
• “Through a crooked attorney.” The record does not adjudicate Church’s ethics and this expert will not. It establishes that Church acted for the bondholders’ committee, solicited competing glass manufacturers to buy the bonds while asking that Three Rivers not be told, and ten months later represented the purchaser while withholding his identity from the creditors [@ev-0059, Defs. Ex. O-6082; Defs. Ex. H-5743; Gov. Ex. 1200].
• The $500 and the double retainer. Still testimony only. No engagement letter, payment record or RFC file is held, and Tips and Smith disagree on who retained Church — Smith says the board, Tips says Church was the Tulsa firm’s own attorney [@ev-0041; @ev-0039].
• The Tulsa connection. Independently traced. A telegram of April 14, 1933 from Searcy reports that Collins “not in position to trade with Three Rivers as long as it is going concern because same bank at Tulsa financing him and Three Rivers” [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 479, part 16, side fol. 59557]. Nothing else held confirmed a Tulsa lender.
• The RFC loan. Confirmed to have existed and failed, from the other side: “Q. Was this loan made? A. No. It was not made. Q. Did Hartford have anything to do or take any action which resulted in the refusal of the loan by the R. F. C.? A. No” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10207]. Hartford also denied knowledge of who bought the bonds — Safford’s letter of April 22, 1936 to Searcy, sworn to be true: “Referring to the bonds, we haven’t the faintest idea who bought the bonds” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10208].
• “They went into the Federal Court.” Right about the courts, wrong about the sale. There were three federal proceedings — Hartford’s suit at Corpus Christi from October 1932, and two 77-B petitions — but the November 1936 sale was confirmed in the state district court at George West [@ev-0059, part 09, fols. 10219, 10221-10224]. A previous article recorded Tips as simply mistaken on this point; the fuller record shows what he was conflating.
• Owens-Illinois as a destroyer of Three Rivers. Not supported. O-I declined the bonds in writing [@ev-0059, Defs. Ex. O-6083].

The antitrust case

The expert now holds part of the case itself: the transcript of record in Hartford-Empire Co. v. United States, before the Supreme Court in the October Term of 1943 [ev-0059]. That much of Tips’ account is settled — there was an industry-wide federal antitrust proceeding against the glass machinery combination, Ball Brothers and Hartford-Empire were in it, Three Rivers was one of the Government’s named counts, and it reached the Supreme Court.

What is not held is the outcome — but less is missing than an earlier version of this section claimed. That version said that “nothing held establishes whether the proceeding was criminal or civil, what relief issued, or whether any fine was imposed.” The first of those three was false when written, and the evidence for it sits sixty lines above in this same article.

The Government’s charge against Ball Brothers is held in full, and it is followed by a numbered schedule headed Relief Requested: cancellation of four sets of 1933 agreements, an injunction against further participation in Hartford’s licensing policy, “an order directing Ball Brothers to divest itself of the plants and other assets acquired from Three Rivers Glass Company,” and an injunction restraining Ball and its officers “from continuing the practices complained of” [@ev-0059, part 18, fols. 64374-64375]. Every item is equitable. Nothing in it asks for a fine, and no count of an indictment appears anywhere in the four parts held. A suit that prays for cancellation, injunction and divestiture is a suit in equity, and this expert can now say so: the proceeding whose record it holds was civil. That is not a small thing to have settled, because both surviving popular accounts describe it in criminal terms — Tips’ “they were tried in Toledo and found guilty… the Supreme Court upheld their conviction. This broke up the glass trust” [ev-0041] and Smith’s narrower “the Ball Brothers Glass Company was later indicted… It was eventually forced to pay a fine” [ev-0039]. Both are using the wrong vocabulary for the case they are describing. Whether some separate criminal prosecution also existed is a different question, and nothing held bears on it either way.

The outcome is now partially known. The case reached the Supreme Court as Hartford-Empire Co. v. United States, 323 U.S. 386 (1945), decided January 8, 1945. It was a civil equity suit — twelve corporations and 101 individuals as defendants — with the district court finding “deliberate” antitrust violations and the Supreme Court ordering compulsory reasonable-royalty licensing on equipment patents [ev-0063]. No fine was imposed because no fine was asked for: it was equity, not criminal. Tips’ own account — naming Toledo as the venue, naming multiple defendants, describing the scope as industry-wide — tracks the decision more closely than Smith’s, who named only Ball Brothers and invented a fine that never existed [ev-0063]. The opinion itself is not admitted as primary evidence here; what is held is a research note’s reading of it, and that reading records that Three Rivers is not individually named in the Supreme Court’s opinion.

Smith adds one thing no other source does: that Tips personally testified [ev-0039]. Tips does not say so himself; he says an Assistant Attorney General came to see him [ev-0041]. The extract does not contain his name as a witness, but it covers four parts of fifty-eight and cannot settle it.

BRG reports that the Supreme Court ordered Ball to sell the Three Rivers holdings in 1947 and that the sale followed in September 1954 [ev-0042]. An earlier version of this section called that merely “consistent with divestiture relief.” It is more than consistent: the Government asked for precisely that remedy, against precisely this company, in those words [@ev-0059, part 18, fol. 64375]. What BRG reports is the relief requested being granted. The decree that would confirm it is still not held, and BRG’s route to the 1947 date is Roller rather than the decree, so the corroboration runs between a pleading and a secondary report — but they meet.

How Three Rivers appears elsewhere in the case

The plant has a count of its own in the pleading, and it also turns up three times in the wider record where nobody is talking about it in particular. Those passages are worth having, because they show what this company had become to the people running the industry.

By the time the Government drew its charts, Three Rivers was a component of Ball Brothers. A witness was taken through an exhibit plotting production on three curves — a fourteen-company group, a four-company group, and all companies — and asked where various firms sat in it. Salem is discussed as part of Anchor-Hocking “since it was acquired by Anchor-Hocking.” Then:

“Q. Three Rivers Glass Company, is that in there for the years prior to 1930?

“A. Three Rivers is in as part of Ball Brothers since it has been part of Ball Brothers. It is also in the all[-companies] curve for every year it made glass containers.” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10539]

That is the acquisition stated as bookkeeping. Whatever the deed said, in the statistics the Government put before the court this factory had no separate existence after 1936; it was a quantity inside somebody else’s line.

The head of one of the majors was asked about it on oath and disclaimed it. In the middle of an examination about Frank C. Ball, a memorandum of 6 May 1933 to F. Goodwin Smith signed by A. T. Safford, Jr. was admitted from Hartford’s files as Government Exhibit No. 836, and the witness — addressed throughout as Mr. Levis — was then asked about this plant:

“Q. Mr. Levis, Three Rivers was what, at that time?

“A. It was a glass factory at Three Rivers, Texas.

“Q. Did your company have any connection with that company?

“A. Not that I know of.

“Q. You did not own it or anything like that?

“A. Not that I know of. …

“Q. It was a licensee, as far as you knew, of Hartford, was it not?

“A. It was at one time[;] I don’t know as to date[.]

“Q. It was a competitor of yours, was it not, in that part of the world?” [@ev-0059, part 04, at fol. 4040]

The answer to the last question is outside the window this expert holds. The window does not name the witness’s company either, and this article does not supply one. What it does supply is the shape of the questions, which are about ownership, and two facts conceded in passing by a hostile witness: that Three Rivers was a Hartford licensee, and that it was a competitor of a major producer in its part of the country. A plant nobody could place on a map was nonetheless worth a paragraph in the Government’s examination of one of the largest men in the industry.

The same passage carries a fragment about Ball that this article should not overstate. The witness had been asked whether “Mr. Frank C. Ball, as you testified, took the position in December, 1938, he had an understanding with you in the spring of 1933 that you would not man[u]facture over 100,000 gross,” and answered: “I do not deny Mr. Ball’s position; and mine was that it was not so” [@ev-0059, part 04, at fol. 4040]. The ware is not named in the window and Three Rivers is not part of that exchange. What it establishes is only that Frank C. Ball was claiming private output understandings dating from the spring of 1933 — the season of the agreements the Government’s schedule of relief asks to have cancelled — and that the other party denied it.

And the letter this article already quotes has an author. The complaint about Three Rivers’ “actions of a most demoralizing character” comes from Government Exhibit No. 583 [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 59692]. That exhibit was read aloud to the court in a part of the record this article had not reached, and the bench identified it there: “The Court: It was addressed by Mr. Carter to Mr. Goodwin Smith,” after counsel introduced it as a letter that “refers to the situation regarding Three Rivers and Hemingray” [@ev-0059, part 04, at fol. 3155]. The letter itself speaks of “our Sales Department” and “our beverage customers,” and reports Mr. Levis’ view of the licence situation the way a man reports his principal’s. This expert cannot read a letterhead in the window it holds and does not assign Carter to a company. But it is worth noticing that the sworn denial above and the loudest surviving complaint about this plant’s conduct stand at the two ends of the same name.

What is not held

• Fifty-four of the fifty-eight parts of the transcript. A search of all fifty-eight parts has located and partially read material not in the four-part extract, including George A. Ball’s testimony in Part 5, the Government’s brief in Part 54, and Hartford’s “Chronology of Relations” in Part 17 [ev-0069]. Those readings are from a research note and should be checked against the primary pages when the extract is extended.
• The decision and decree in the antitrust case. The case citation and outcome are now known through an admitted research note [ev-0063], but the opinion itself, the decree, and the Ball divestiture order are not held as primary evidence.
• The 1947 antitrust suit. A separate 1947 lawsuit by Three Rivers Glass Company against Hartford-Empire, Owens-Illinois and Ball Brothers was filed in federal court in Indiana and reported in the Indianapolis Times of September 16, 1947 [ev-0070]. It is not the same as the divestiture order; whether it is related, and what became of it, is not held.
• The Live Oak County instruments behind the transfer. Lindholm’s research cites a deed at Book 71, page 507 — “Charles R. Tips sold the Three Rivers Glass Company, Inc. out to the Ball Glass Corporation… Signed: March 31, 1938. Filed April 11, 1938” [ev-0041] — but the instrument itself is not held, and the record above shows the operative transfer was the trustee’s sale of November 1936.
• The Reconstruction Finance Corporation’s own file. What is held is Hartford’s side of it, under oath: that the reorganization loan “was not made,” and Safford’s denial that Hartford did anything to bring about the refusal [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10207]. The RFC’s file, which would show why it refused, is not held.
• Church’s office files, and anything from the Tulsa lender. Church’s outgoing letters survive in this record because Hartford kept them; his own file does not. The Tulsa bank is named only in a Hartford telegram reporting what a third party said about it [@ev-0059, part 16, side fol. 59557].
• The extract’s own limits. It is machine-generated OCR from the Internet Archive’s derivatives for parts 4, 9, 16 and 18, capturing passages matching “Three Rivers” or “Searcy” with surrounding context; no page images have been matched to it, and several quotations above carry visible OCR damage where words have been supplied in brackets [ev-0059].