The Buyer

Ball Brothers appears in this expert’s holdings four times over, and not in the order a corporate history would put them. It is first a name the licensor offered to a struggling receiver as a possible purchaser [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10186]. It is then a buyer, working through a San Antonio lawyer who did not disclose whom he acted for [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60658]. It is then the owner that operated this plant for one year and stopped [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1208, part 16, fol. 60667]. And it is last a defendant against whom the United States asked for an order to give the plant back [@ev-0059, part 18, fol. 64375].

What follows is not a corporate history. Ball Brothers was a large concern with a long life on either side of the year it owned a factory in Live Oak County, and this expert holds almost nothing about any of that. What it holds is the firm’s own correspondence, produced under subpoena in a suit against its licensor, about this one plant.

The name the company used

The narrative sources held here call it several things. Texas Glass, the Mackey collection, the marker research and the Bottle Research Group between them use “Ball Brothers,” “Ball Brothers Glass,” “Ball Brothers Glass Company of Muncie,” “Ball Brothers Glass Mfg.” and “Ball Glass Corporation” [@ev-0038; @ev-0039; @ev-0040; @ev-0041; @ev-0042]. The last of those is the name in the 1938 Live Oak County deeds [@ev-0041, p. 62].

The phrase “Ball Brothers Glass” does not occur anywhere in the trial record held here. In the exhibits — which are the company’s own letters, on its own paper, over its own officers’ signatures — it is Ball Brothers Company, of Muncie, Indiana [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1207, part 16, fol. 60665]; and the Texas plant is Ball Glass Corporation, of Three Rivers, Texas [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1211, part 16, fols. 60669-60670]. This article is filed under the first of those because it is the name the company signed.

Two names doing different work

The lemon-era note this article ports recorded the name variation as an open question — the forms “likely all refer to the same entity or closely related corporate structures,” not fully disambiguated. The record does better than that, because the distinction between the two names was doing work for the people using them.

In September 1936 William C. Church told the licensor’s Texas counsel that the party he represented was “Mr. George A. Ball of Muncie, Indiana” — an individual, not a company [@ev-0059, Defs. Ex. H-5743, part 18, fol. 63510; Gov. Ex. 1200, part 16, fol. 60658]. In November the plant “was finally purchased by a representative of George A. Ball and title put into the Ball Glass Corporation” [@ev-0059, part 09, fols. 10267-10268]. Through the summer of 1937 the plant’s letters go up to Muncie on Ball Glass Corporation letterhead, signed by R. A. Ellerman as manager, and are answered on Ball Brothers Company letterhead [@ev-0059, Gov. Exs. 1211, 1215, part 16, fols. 60669, 60673].

Then in May 1938 the licensor’s president wrote to “Mr. George A. Ball, Vice President, Ball Brothers Co., Muncie, Ind.” about “our equipment which the Ball Glass Corporation is now using at their Three Rivers plant,” and asked the question the whole arrangement had left open:

“Is there no way in which you personally could sign the licenses and leases giving you the right to let Ball Glass Corporation use the machinery covered by the license and leases?”

[@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1207, part 16, fols. 60665-60666]

Hartford was writing to the man because it could not identify the company. Ball answered as the parent, and in doing so supplied the only statement of the relationship this expert holds:

“Section 2, Article 3 of the general feeder license [agree]ment covers all feeders located at the plants of Ball Brothers Company and its subsidiaries. Three Rivers is a subsidiary of Ball Brothers Company, and therefore, the feeders in that plant are covered in our agreement.”

[@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1208, part 16, fol. 60667]

That is worth reading for what it was for. The word “subsidiary” is not offered as a description of the corporate structure; it is offered as a reason not to sign a separate licence. The one relationship statement held comes from a letter whose purpose was to avoid a document. It is still the best evidence there is, and this expert takes it — but takes it knowing what it was doing.

Hartford did not accept it. Two months later Ball declined again, and this time gave no corporate reason at all, only a commercial one [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1210, part 16, fol. 60668].

Where the company was

Muncie, Indiana [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1207, part 16, fol. 60665]. It also had a Texas plant of its own at Wichita Falls, and that plant is the reason given for closing this one [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1208, part 16, fol. 60667]. Nothing held here describes the Muncie works, the Wichita Falls works, or any other Ball facility.

How the licensor put its name forward

The purchase is usually told as something Ball did to Three Rivers. The record holds a step before that. Under cross-examination, Hartford’s secretary was asked whether Hartford had anything to do with the receiver’s dealings with Ball, and answered:

“Well, as I say, I think we may have suggested Ball Brothers as a possible purchaser for that particular plant.”

He added that Ball was not the only name suggested — “I think we also suggested General Glass Company” — and denied any attempt to fix the price: “Did you make any attempt to fix the price in any way? A. Oh, no” [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10186].

This expert reads that carefully. It establishes that the licensor named Ball to the receivership as a candidate buyer, in or before 1934, two years before the sale. It does not establish that Hartford arranged the sale, and the same witness testified that he knew nothing of any Ball negotiation between the fall of 1934 and September 1936 [@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10266]. The full sequence, with the lawyer in the middle of it, is in the article on the foreclosure.

What it did with the plant

Briefly and, on the face of the letters, ordinarily. Ball Glass Corporation ran the plant into 1937 under R. A. Ellerman, whose surviving letters are complaints that competitors were quoting below an understanding — Capstan and Hazel-Atlas pricing modernistic jars at the pantry-jar price, Owens-Illinois quoting a coffee packer in Oklahoma City, Owens-Illinois again on rail-and-barge freight differentials [@ev-0059, Gov. Exs. 1211, 1213, 1215, part 16, fols. 60669, 60671, 60673]. The plant that had spent the early 1930s being reported to the licensor as a price cutter spent its last operating summer reporting price cutters.

Then it stopped, in December 1937, and the only contemporaneous statement of that date is a subordinate clause in a letter about a licence: “As you know, Three Rivers has not been operated since December” [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1208, part 16, fol. 60667]. The reason Ball gave, two months later, was capacity:

“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]

What the Government said the company was doing

The trial record contains the Government’s own numbered summary of what it charged against each defendant. The Ball Brothers list runs to eight items, and two of them are about this plant. The fifth charge:

“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]

And the sixth item of relief requested:

“An order directing Ball Brothers to divest itself of the plants and other assets acquired from Three Rivers Glass Company.”

[@ev-0059, part 18, fol. 64375]

The other charges are about fruit jars, price leadership and the 1933 agreements, and they are what put a company from Muncie in the same paragraph as a factory in Live Oak County. An exhibit table in the record counts domestic fruit jars shipped in the United States against three named makers, and Ball Brothers accounts 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 this expert cannot say is what became of any of it. The charges and the relief requested are pleadings. The record held here stops before the decision.

What this expert does not hold about Ball Brothers

• The outcome as to Ball. Whether the divestiture order was granted, refused or modified is not in the four parts of the transcript held here. The narrative sources say things about it that this expert has already found unreliable, and the article on the foreclosure sets out why.
• The dismantling. That the plant was taken down, and when, rests on the marker research and the Mackey collection rather than on anything Ball wrote [@ev-0040; @ev-0041]. The letters held stop in September 1938 with a factory manager still on the letterhead [@ev-0041, p. 64]. What came down did not include the melting tank, which Ball remodelled and which was still in working condition when Ball sold the property in 1954 [@ev-0041, pp. 62, 65].
• The 1954 sale. The disposal of the remaining property rests on county deed abstracts in the marker research [@ev-0041, p. 62], not on a deed this expert has seen.
• Anything about the company itself. Its founding, its size, its officers beyond the four who signed letters about Three Rivers, its other plants, its fruit-jar business except as one exhibit table counts it. No held source is about Ball Brothers.
• The “Manufacturing” name. “Ball Brothers Glass Mfg.” occurs in the narrative sources and in no primary document held here. This expert does not know whether it was ever the company’s name.