New exhibit on asbestos reveals a dark, unsettling and important B-N story

A story of corporate greed, willful worker exploitation, and human tragedy in Bloomington-Normal began nearly a century ago. And the investments in worker safety the Unarco company and others failed to make are paying dividends of a horrible sort — ones of blood and lost public treasure.

It’s the story of asbestos, the subject of a new exhibit opening Saturday at the McLean County Museum of History.

“The anger that you have knowing that the company did this to your family, it eats on you daily,” said Terry Redman of Wapella.

Redman lost his father, George, to intestinal cancer caused by asbestos exposure. The Unarco plant on Bloomington’s west side operated for nearly 20 years before it closed in 1970. George Redman worked there the entire time.

“I watched him dwindle away at Carle Clinic in Champaign, from a man that was about 175-180 pounds to just over 100 pounds. It was terrible. All he wanted to do was go home and die,” said Redman.

McLean County Museum of History

Terry Redman said when his dad was done with work each day you would have thought he was a baker.

“He would wear gray slacks and a white T-shirt. But when he would come home his gray slacks were almost as white as his T-shirt. Us as little kids, my brother and I, we’d go up and slap his legs and watch the dust fly out. Well, it was asbestos,” said Redman.

Redman’s mom would take their dad’s pants and try to shake them out before laundering. George Redman died in 1977. His son said his mom has had part of a lung removed, also probably due to asbestos.

McLean County Museum of History

Cheryl Wills lives near Colfax. She grew up near Arrowsmith. Her dad, Willard Tipsord, also worked at Unarco, though only for a few years in the 1950s. He then became a carpenter and the exposure to the cancer-causing fibers continued in caulk, tiles, drywall, insulation and a host of other products.

Willard Tipsord died of mesothelioma, a particular kind of lung cancer strongly associated with asbestos exposure.

He was a big guy at 6 feet 2 inches, who worked and worked. He never complained about anything, Cheryl Will said, until in his early 50s he started getting tired. Wills said her dad started talking about discomfort in his shoulder. And he was the stoic type. It took something for him to admit discomfort. He died at 57.

“You just saw this very strong hardworking man just withering away. He was in pain. He lost weight. He didn’t have energy. You lost him day by day,” she said.

The deaths of more than 100 workers at the Unarco plant have been documented as asbestos-related. That’s a low number because some death certificates say only cancer or respiratory disease. That’s not a definitive link.

Asbestos was mined before it was shaped into other products. The asbestos sent to the plant in Bloomington came from South Africa.

Museum of History exhibit curator Susan Hartzold said there also were asbestos mines in the United States, Canada, and India. It was internationally pervasive.

“They crushed the rock. They crushed it again until it all broke down into soft silky fibers. And then it would be like spinning yarn that was wool, said Hartzold. "They have machines that would spin it into ‘rovings,’ which is the first step. If they wanted to make a thread, they would spin that tighter and then it would be woven into fabric.”

For many years, asbestos was considered a wonder product.

“Unarco is not unique. This is going on all over the world in multiple, multiple products. Anything from Christmas snow for under the tree to pipe insulation to firefighter clothing. Unarco is just one of many,” said Mike Matejka, one of the people who helped put the exhibit together.

In the Bloomington plant there wasn’t a lot of attention to worker safety. Matejka, a Twin City labor historian, said many workers made the comment it was like it was snowing.

“You looked up through the skylights and it was just all these twinkling fibers in the air that just coated everything,” he said. “When you look at the photographs, it looks like a cotton mill.

For some years, the company provided little foam masks, but those were flimsy, and quickly clogged. They were not respirators. And Cheryl Wills said even the inadequate masks weren’t always there. She recalled a story from her dad who said workers would tie men’s handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths.

McLean County Museum of History

“Management came out and made them take the hankies off of their faces," she said. "They would not let them wear hankies to protect themselves.”

Wills is a nurse and looking back on what her father said, dismays her.

“It was common sense that if you are breathing in something that is irritating your nose, your mouth, your throat, you can see it in the air, it can’t be good for you. And so it makes me very very angry that management would have stooped that low to knowingly make those people breath that in,” said Wills.

The company did know. Retired Twin City attorney Jim Walker gave the museum of history hundreds of case files of workers who ended up suing Unarco and its successor company, Owens-Corning, for their health problems.

“The most shocking thing is already in the '30s, the industry is doing research because they know there is a hazard here. And they’re paying for cancer research, but then they’re declaring their research proprietary because they paid for it,” said Matejka.

Terry Redman said there was active suppression of evidence about the health risks.

“I’ve seen documents where Unarco doctors had actually warned the company that, hey, you need to do more precautionary measures, protect these workers a little more than these little foam rubber masks that you’re giving them. And that was back in the '30s or '40s,” said Redman.

Company doctors may have issued some warnings, but Matejka said they also played a part in the cover-up. It involved a twisted kind of worker health monitoring.

McLean County Museum of History

“Workers were X-rayed on a regular basis and once somebody showed signs of disease, the company would come and [say], ‘Boy we’re sorry, we think you’re sick. We’re going to have to let you go, but we’ll give you a settlement if you’ll sign this paper and agree not to sue,’” said Matejka.

The Unarco plant was in Cicero before it came to Bloomington. Terry Redman said Unarco moved to Central Illinois when workers in Cicero started getting sick and when workers in Bloomington also started to ail, the company moved to Paris, Illinois.

“So, they were just outrunning their problem as people that worked there were getting sick,” said Redman.

One of the discoveries lawyers made during the era of lawsuits was the company doctors’ X-ray films, more than 15 linear feet of them looking at the lungs of workers in Bloomington-Normal, said Hartzold, the exhibit curator.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, Matejka said, the evidence was not only suppressed, but companies claimed "kook doctors" are raising the questions.

“And there is correspondence between Bloomington and Cape Asbestos [in South Africa]], 'Be careful, this study is coming and we’re finding this.’ So, they knew what was coming,” she said.

Only in the late '60s and '70s did independent research and court cases begin to change the tide. Matejka said reading the depositions is hair raising.

“I’m still amazed that some of these corporate folks told the truth under oath,” he said.

Part of that may be because there was a massive paper trail that eventually came to light.

At the Bloomington plant in 1970, the company stopped making asbestos and started producing industrial sinks and plumbing fixtures. Lawsuits still caught up with them, said Matejka.

Then came regulation. And then the industry collapsed. Owens-Corning bought the Unarco plant in Bloomington. Unarco went bankrupt in the ‘80s. Owens-Corning lasted a couple decades longer before it went under. The Unarco name still exists, though. The company makes shopping carts. But if you were an investor between the 1930s and 1960s, Matejka said you probably made a bunch of money with Unarco.

“They made all this money on this suffering, and they’ve done very well with a miracle product,” he said.

Terry Redman said the death of his dad was one of the lead cases in the many asbestos lawsuits filed.

“We didn’t know anything about going to court, or what a class action lawsuit was and we didn’t realize that whatever award she might get over the death of dad was going to be split about 60-plus ways with different families. People ended up with very little and it’s a crying shame,” said Redman.

He’s still glad they participated in the litigation because it exposed corporate America as "bean counters."

“If they know they’re hurting an employee, they don’t really care as long as they’re making money, and if there’s a settlement over what they did and they’re still making money, they’re going to go ahead and do what they need to do to make that profit,” said Redman.

Asbestos companies set up trust funds to pay for lawsuit settlements. Matejka said those were exhausted in 10 to 15 years, triggering lawsuits against successor companies. And the public is still paying the price. Go to any commercial building and residential house built in that era and there will be asbestos.

“Think about since the 1980s how many school buildings, how many corporate buildings, how much have local taxpayers spent on asbestos remediation cleaning this up? And it still continues,” said Matejka.

The Normal Public Library is closed right now for an expensive asbestos remediation. Anybody now, who was alive in the 20^th century, was exposed to asbestos, said Matejka.

Terry Redman said his father’s death and the paltry help from the court case shaped his politics from an early age. And it’s still in his thoughts often.

“Every day! Yeah. Every day. I think the government needs to do as much as they can to protect the workers because the companies, most of them won’t,” he said.

Certainly, asbestos is a story of consumer awareness. Matejka said that’s a story that never ends.

“Asbestos is a scandal of the 20^th century. What about forever chemicals? What are the things out there now that are being industrially used that consumers are buying that we may find out or companies may already know are hazardous?” said Matejka.

And he said workers often are the first guinea pigs, the ones exposed most heavily and who suffer the first consequences.

“And it’s also very important when people mock government regulation and government studies is just somehow a detriment to business or a burden on business. This is protecting the business, protecting the consumer, protecting the working person,” said Matejka.

Societal legacies can obscure what happens to individual people — and families. The premature death of a loved one, Cheryl Wills said, can make one bitter.

“It was such an injustice that it should have happened. That added to it," she said. "That it was preventable. That there were bad people making decisions to endanger these people’s lives. And even now that makes me angry.”

Wills said she has tried to channel her anger into focusing on the future and preventing such things. She said her daughter watched her grandfather die slowly and painfully and was aware of the cause.

“That daughter has grown up to be a labor educator now. She is nationally and cross-border training people on workers’ rights, which is basically human rights,” said Wills.

The asbestos deaths affect descendants of those who died in many ways. Terry Redman said it hurts family sustainability, for one.

“You don’t think about this, but it’s the generational wealth that you lose, too. My father died at 43 making a darn good living as a laborer right here in McLean County. There’s close to 25 years that he could have worked and built up an estate, but that was all taken away. And that affects every generation thereafter,” said Redman.

The most telling loss is one that may never be apparent. How can children mourn what they never knew?

“He was a good man and he would have been such an influence and such a blessing on the kids and grandkids had he lived day today to be part of their life,” said Wills.

“I have three children and I tell them frequently that oh if your grandpa could only have seen you. And it’s, it’s painful every day,” said Redman.

The asbestos exhibit opening Saturday at the Museum of History will stay for several years. Hartzold said there are challenges in creating an exhibit without creating a hazardous waste zone.

“There really are no objects. We have two objects in this exhibit. So, trying to avoid making it a book on the wall. But the wealth of imagery that we were able to garner from The Pantagraph negative collection really helps to paint that picture of what it was like in the factory and the kinds of conditions these men worked in” said Hartzold.

She said the case files of attorney Jim Walker brought to light the personal experiences of the workers and tell a compelling story to get the word out that it’s still out there.

“Sometimes the darker stories are the ones that are more important. We need to know it’s still out there," Hartzold said. “I grew up in this community and most of the people I know never knew about Unarco.”