The Successor

Knox is the company the story of Three Rivers ends on. Its plant at Palestine took the skilled men when the Live Oak County factory stopped, and the lemon-era note this article ports called it Three Rivers Glass’s “de facto successor in the Texas glass industry.” That is a fair description of what happened to the workmen. It is not what the trial record shows, and the record comes first here because it is earlier: before Knox was anybody’s successor, it was a licensee of the same company, under the same patents, in the same room.

The company under the name

Knox was founded by Roy Underwood at Knox, Pennsylvania, in 1917, and by 1935 the umbrella firm was Knox Glass Associates, Inc. — a Pennsylvania combine with plants scattered across the country [ev-0052]. Its southern expansion ran through Roy’s brother Chester, under the subsidiary name Knox Glass Bottle Co. of Mississippi: Jackson, Mississippi in 1932, and Palestine, Texas in 1941 [ev-0052]. The parent was renamed Knox Glass Co., Inc. in 1956, became a subsidiary of Hunt Foods & Industries on 15 October 1965, and its ten remaining plants passed to Glass Container Corp. — in 1968 by the company monograph [ev-0052], in 1969 by the Texas historical marker at the plant gate [ev-0013]. The one-year disagreement is recorded and not resolved.

The name matters for reading the trial record, where the firm appears as Knox Glass Bottle Company — the 1917 name, still the one the licence files and the pleadings use in the 1930s.

Knox in the trial record

Hartford’s own tabulated register of licences keeps a dated ledger of changes to each licensee’s ware field. On the page this expert holds, the 1936 entries run down the year, and one of them is Knox: “1/1/36 - Knox Glass - pressure w[a]re (75,000” — a ware class and a gross limit, granted on the first day of that year [@ev-0059, part 18, line 68242].

Four lines away on the same page: “4/11/36 - Kna[p]e-Cole[man] - Licenses expired upon financial failure.” And a little further: “11/27/36 - Three Rivers - acquired by Ball” [@ev-0059, part 18, line 68242].

One page of one clerk’s ledger, one year, three Texas-connected licensees. In April a Texas licensee’s rights lapsed because the licensee failed. In November a Texas licensee changed hands. And in January — before either — Knox was given a new class of ware to make. Nothing on the page connects the three entries and this expert does not connect them. What the page does is put them in one frame at one scale, which is how the licensor saw them: rows in a register.

Fourteen companies, and all companies

The Government put an exhibit before the court plotting production on three curves — a four-company group, a fourteen-company group, and all companies. A witness was taken through it firm by firm. Asked where Knox sat, he answered:

“Q. Knox is in both sets of figures, isn’t it?

“A. Yes, in all companies and in Fourteen Com[panies].”

[@ev-0059, part 09, fol. 10539]

Two questions earlier the same witness had placed Three Rivers: “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 two firms measured against each other in the Government’s own apparatus, on one page of transcript. Knox was large enough to be one of the fourteen the Government tracked separately. Three Rivers was not, and by the time the charts were drawn it had no line of its own at all.

What the Government asked to have cancelled

Knox is named three times in the schedule of charges and relief. Ball Brothers, on the pleading, has a virtual monopoly in fruit jars “by virtue of 1933 agreements with Owens and Hazel-Atlas, with Brockway Glass Company, and with Knox Glass Bottle Company” [@ev-0059, part 18, line 98674]. Among the relief requested against Ball is “cancellation of the 1933 agreement between Ball Brothers and The Knox Glass Bottle Company” [@ev-0059, part 18, fol. 64374]. And Thatcher’s own count rests in part on “the 1932 agreement with Knox Glass Bottle Company,” by which Thatcher, Owens and Liberty are said to maintain a virtual monopoly in milk bottles [@ev-0059, part 18, fol. 64375].

Knox is not a defendant in anything held here — it is named as the other party to agreements the Government wanted undone. That is a different position from Owens-Illinois’, which filed its own exhibits in the case, and the difference is worth keeping straight.

Palestine

The plant that took the Three Rivers men opened on 5 July 1941, after ninety-five days of construction on what had been a cotton field, with a ninety-ton gas furnace feeding four Lynch 10s [ev-0052]. It used the T-in-a-keystone mark from 1941 to 1952 and made the “TEXAS MASON / MADE IN TEXAS BY TEXANS” jar around 1948-49 [ev-0052]. At its peak it employed more than four hundred and fifty people by the marker’s count and nearly five hundred by the monograph’s [@ev-0013; @ev-0052]. It closed in 1984, and the last jars made there carry the closing date, 20 December 1984 [ev-0013].

That plant is the subject of its own article, which works out why it was Knox and not Owens-Illinois, and traces the one worker migration this expert can document by name. None of that is re-argued here.

”Successor” is a word this expert would not have chosen

Nothing held makes Knox a successor to Three Rivers Glass Company in any sense a lawyer would recognize. It bought nothing from the receiver, took no assets, acquired no marks, and did not exist in Texas until four years after the Live Oak County plant stopped. The plant it built was new ground.

What it did was hire the men, and that is real: it is documented in this expert’s holdings for at least one of them by name, and it is what the Palestine article establishes. But the record shows the two firms first as contemporaries rather than as predecessor and successor — two rows in the same licensor’s book, one of them large enough for the Government to count on its own, one of them not.

The lemon note’s word is worth keeping in view because it is how the story is usually told in Three Rivers, and because it is a claim about people rather than about companies. Stated that way it holds.

What this expert does not hold about Knox

• Any Knox document. Everything above is either the trial record talking about Knox in the third person or a published company monograph. Nothing here was written by the firm.
• What the 1932 Thatcher agreement and the 1933 Ball agreement said. Only that the Government wanted them cancelled and what it said they achieved.
• The rest of the licence entry. The register line breaks at “(75,000” and the window closes; the unit is almost certainly gross, and this expert does not hold the character that would prove it.
• Whether Knox ever competed with Three Rivers. Six admitted items name the firm and none puts Knox glass in a Texas market before 1941.
• Whether the “O’Neill” that Owens-Illinois bought in 1933 is Knox-O’Neill. A trade letter in the record reports “the purchase of O’Neill by the Owens-Illinois” [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1026, part 16, fol. 60429], and the company monograph records that “Knox-O’Neill sold suction machines to O-I in 1929” [ev-0052]. A sale of machines in 1929 and a purchase of a company in 1933 are not the same transaction, and this expert does not assert that they involve the same O’Neill.
• The Glass Container Corp. year. 1968 or 1969; two sources, one apart.
• Herbert Knox Smith is not this company. One of the six occurrences of “Knox” in the extract is a man’s middle name in a 1930 letter [@ev-0059, part 04, fol. 3155], and a search for the firm finds him. Recorded so that a later count of the record’s Knox material starts from five and not six.