The Company That Said No

Owens-Illinois enters the story of Three Rivers as a destroyer. Charles R. Tips named it first among the three companies an Assistant Attorney General told him had been found out — “what Owens-Illinois Glass Co., Hartford Empire Co., and Ball Brothers had done to convict them of violating the anti-trust laws” [@ev-0041, Tips to Lindholm, October 11, 1971]. He credited it with building the Waco plant on the market his own factory had proved. Texas Glass credited it with the Palestine plant that took his displaced workmen [@ev-0039, p. 26].

The trial record contains exactly one document in which Owens-Illinois speaks about Three Rivers Glass Company, and in it the company refuses to have anything to do with it.

The refusal

On 12 November 1935 William C. Church, of Church & Graves in San Antonio, wrote to Owens-Illinois Glass Co., Toledo, Ohio, as attorney for the bondholders’ committee. He offered the bonds at a discount, and with them the plant [@ev-0059, Defs. Ex. O-6082, part 18, fol. 64126]. He asked that his own client’s company not be told.

Owens-Illinois answered two days later, over the signature of C. B. Belknap, Vice President in Charge of Legal Department [@ev-0059, Defs. Ex. O-6083, part 18, fol. 64127]:

“In reply to your air mail letter of November 12, 1935, this company is not interested now or at any other time in purchasing, either indi[vidually] or in conjunction with any one else, the Three Rivers Glass C[ompany] or any other glass bottle company or the bonds or other [i]nterest in such glass company.”

It is a wider refusal than the question asked for. Church had asked about one company’s bonds; Belknap declined that company, any other glass bottle company, and any interest in one, now or at any other time. The reply went out by air mail because Church had asked for air mail.

The transaction that letter declines is the subject of a separate article [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60658]; what belongs here is only the answer. On the one occasion this expert can document, the company that folklore casts as a buyer of Texas competitors was offered a Texas competitor and would not have it.

The claim, and what the record does to it

Tips’ letter names Owens-Illinois among the companies whose conduct destroyed his own [@ev-0041, Tips to Lindholm, October 11, 1971]. Against the single document in which the company is asked to act, that claim does not stand. It should be recorded plainly, because it runs against the man whose testimony this expert otherwise relies on heavily, and because the correction comes from a defendant’s own exhibit rather than from an argument.

What the record does not do is make Tips’ broader recollection wrong. He was describing an industry, and Owens-Illinois was in it.

Whether Owens-Illinois was a defendant

It was, and the record shows it in its own bookkeeping. The exhibits above are numbered in the defendants’ series with an “O” prefix — O-6082, O-6083 — and a few folios later the same series carries a company document titled “Owens-Illinois Glass Company — Presto Fruit Jar Advertising and Sales Promotion” [@ev-0059, Defs. Ex. O-6036, part 18, fol. 64196]. A company that is not a party does not file its advertising budget.

The Government’s charges name it repeatedly. Ball Brothers, on the pleading, “by virtue of 1933 agreements with Owens and Hazel-Atlas, with Brockway Glass Company, and with Knox Glass Bottle Company… presently have a virtual monopoly in the manufacture, distribution and sale of fruit jars”; and by its 1933 agreement with Hartford, Ball “together with Owens, Hazel-Atlas, Anchor Hocking and Thatcher presently maintain a virtual monopoly in the manufacture and distribution of glass containers” [@ev-0059, part 18, line 98674]. Among the relief requested is cancellation of the 1933 agreements between Ball Brothers, Hartford, Hazel-Atlas and Owens [@ev-0059, part 18, fol. 64374]. Thatcher’s own count names Owens again, in milk bottles [@ev-0059, part 18, fol. 64375].

So Tips was right that Owens-Illinois was in the case. Two things in his account do not follow from what is held. No count in the Government’s schedule connects Owens-Illinois to Three Rivers. The Three Rivers count is the fifth against Ball Brothers alone — that Ball “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 relief the Government asked for is equitable throughout — cancellations, injunctions, divestiture — not the fine Tips remembered and not the fine Texas Glass reports [@ev-0039, p. 26].

One small thing is worth setting down because it is the kind of detail that looks like corroboration and is not. Tips wrote that the defendants “were tried in Toledo, Ohio.” The only Toledo in the record held here is the address on the envelope: “Owens-Illinois Glass Co., Toledo, Ohio,” where the company had its office [@ev-0059, Defs. Ex. O-6082, part 18, fol. 64126]. This expert holds nothing that names the trial court, and does not assert that Tips’ Toledo was the courthouse rather than the company.

Where the two companies stood in the same trade

A Government exhibit tabulates gross of domestic fruit jars shipped in the United States over twelve years against three named makers: Ball Brothers, Hazel-Atlas and Owens-Illinois [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 947, part 16, fol. 60284]. Owens-Illinois is the smallest of the three in every row where both its figure and Ball’s survive the scan, running between about a tenth and a fifth of Ball Brothers’. The exhibit’s year column is destroyed, so no row here can be dated.

Three Rivers Glass is not one of the three named makers. The complaint that put this plant in front of the licensor — that it was “very active in Texas… selling plain pint and quart jars, without caps” to the wholesale grocery trade — sits on the very next folio [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 948, part 16, fol. 60285]. The industry’s own tabulation and its complaint about a Texas outsider are adjacent pages of the same exhibit run.

Both names on one list

A list of glass companies in part 16 carries “Owens-Illinois Glass Co.” and, on its own line, “Owens-Illinois Glass Co. (Berney-Bond Plant),” with “Three Rivers Glass Co.” five names further down [@ev-0059, part 16, line 146624]. Twenty-seven firms are legible. The heading that would say what the list is falls above the extracted window and this expert does not hold it, so nothing is claimed about what membership meant. What can be said is narrow and still worth saying: a national company large enough to be listed twice and a single plant in Live Oak County appear on the same page of the same file.

What Owens-Illinois was buying while Three Rivers bought a machine

A trade letter of 4 May 1933 among the Government’s exhibits records that the receiver for Three Rivers Glass had been in that day and ordered a #10 on a conditional sales contract. The writer is not identified anywhere in what is held, and on the letter’s own face is not Hartford’s. In the same letter, and at more length, he reported what the majors were doing [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1026, part 16, fol. 60429]:

“You probably noticed by the papers that Owens-Illinois have announced the purchase of the Hemingray Glass Company at Muncie. This is the plant where we expected to put in a battery of #10 machines this year sometime. Also heard on very good authority that the Hartford-Empire people has bought the Miller Machine Company… This deal together with the purchase of O’Neill by the Owens-Illinois, practically cleans up the field with the exception of Lynch and of course Hartford-Empire.”

Two paragraphs of one letter hold both scales of this story: a receiver in Texas buying a single machine on time at $1,000 a month, and the two firms who between them had just finished buying the machinery industry.

The competitor Ball’s manager watched

After Ball Brothers took the plant, its Three Rivers manager wrote to Muncie about Owens-Illinois twice in one summer. On 15 July 1937 R. A. Ellerman asked head office to “find out from Owens Illinois what they sold Southern Coffee and Products Company, Oklahoma City” [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1213, part 16, fol. 60671]; Muncie undertook to get it [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1214, part 16, fol. 60672]. On 31 August the assistant secretary reported back on a different question — that the company had “definite reason to believe that Owens-Illinois have not recently quoted or accepted any new business for shipment via rail with an allowance of the differential between rail and barge and all-rail rates,” and asked Ellerman to send word immediately if he found otherwise [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1215, part 16, fol. 60673].

This is the only picture the record gives of Owens-Illinois as an operating competitor in Texas, and it is secondhand — Ball Brothers watching prices, not Owens-Illinois setting them. It is enough to establish that in 1937 the company was quoting Southwestern accounts, which matters because it had no plant anywhere near them.

Waco, and what “as a direct result” can carry

Owens-Illinois had no Texas plant while Three Rivers Glass was alive. The complete plant-number roster, compiled with two former company employees against corporate records, contains one Texas location in company history: Waco, the second holder of Plant No. 15, 1944 to the present [ev-0054]. The number’s previous holder, Okmulgee, Oklahoma, was idle from the 1929 merger until the company sold it in August 1939 [ev-0053].

The Waco dates come from the company’s own annual reports: construction noted as begun in the 1940 report, delayed by wartime material shortages, the plant not completed until the end of 1943, production from January 1944, formal opening 22 February 1944 [ev-0053]. Three Rivers had been shut since December 1937 [@ev-0059, Gov. Ex. 1208, part 16, fol. 60667].

Tips wrote that Waco was built “as a direct result of the operation of the Three Rivers Glass Company” [@ev-0041, Tips to Lindholm, October 11, 1971]. The dates permit it and do not establish it: an announcement three years after the plant closed is consistent with a market having been demonstrated and equally consistent with a great many other things. This expert holds the sequence and not the cause, and records the claim as the plant’s founder’s, which is what it is.

Palestine

Texas Glass has the displaced workmen going to Palestine, “where a large Owens-Illinois Glass Company had begun operation” [@ev-0039, p. 26]. That is an error. The Palestine plant was Knox’s [ev-0052], and the state historical marker on the site says so [ev-0013]; “Palestine” does not occur in either of the Owens-Illinois company histories held here [@ev-0053; @ev-0054]. The correction is worked out in a separate article and is only noted here.

The jars that did reach Texas

Before Waco, Owens-Illinois served Texas accounts by rail from out-of-state plants [ev-0050]. The Hoffmann-Hayman Crystalvac jars carry the proof: the base of the three-pound jar shows the Diamond-Oval-I mark flanked by a plant code 7 — Alton, Illinois — and a single undotted date digit [ev-0020]. That a San Antonio coffee packer’s jars were being made both in Live Oak County and in Illinois in the same period is the subject of its own article and is not re-argued here.

What this expert does not hold about Owens-Illinois

• The company. Nothing admitted here is a history of Owens-Illinois. Its formation, its scale, its patents and its dealings with Hartford outside the passages quoted are all outside what is held. The two Bottle Research Group compilations relied on above are strong on plants and marks and are not corporate histories of the kind this section would need.
• Any decision or decree. The pleadings are held; the outcome is not, for Owens-Illinois as for every other defendant. Whether it was “found guilty,” whether any conviction was upheld, and whether any fine was paid are all unanswerable from what is here.
• The trial court. Not named in the extract.
• Whether the Waco decision had anything to do with Three Rivers. The annual reports are quoted secondhand and through a plant-history lens; what the board considered is not held.
• Defendants’ Exhibit O-6036 beyond its title. The Presto fruit jar advertising and sales promotion figures begin at the folio cited and the window ends almost immediately; the numbers are not held.
• Anything Owens-Illinois said about Three Rivers other than the refusal. The company is named throughout the extract — in the Government’s charges, in Hartford’s files, in a machinery man’s trade gossip and in Ball Brothers’ internal mail. One document in it is the company speaking.