just like tobacco and carbon tetrachloride (used in dry cleaning and electronics). Most people had some in their home in stove, electric heater and toaster insulation! I personally cut up 1" think solid sheets of it with a bandsaw in college in the 60s to build a solder pot.
The most common use in public and industrial buildings was pipe insulation and acoustic ceiling tiles. If your school had a steam boiler (I remember the radiators), the steam piping and the boiler likely had asbestos insulation. If workers had to repair a valve or pipe, they just ripped it off like they would fiberglass without concern for the dust.
During the 80s and 90s on my field service jobs, I watch asbestos being removed throughout industry, particularly in power plants, paper mills and refineries. It was something to see with all the protective gear they had to wear and I think the material removed was put in special hazardous material landfills.
Asbestos was also used in automotive brake linings up into the 90s, but no longer. So, the darn stuff was all around us and most of it we didn't know about and were not warned of the danger. Sort of like as kids they told us "smoking is not good for you" but we just wanted to be like Marlboro man.
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