Sunshine Laundry Corp. v. White

• Decision Date: 18 April 1951
• Docket Number: No. 136,136
• Citation: 197 Md. 582,80 A.2d 1
• Parties: SUNSHINE LAUNDRY CORP. et al. v. WHITE.
• Court: Maryland Court of Appeals

Page 582

197 Md. 582

80 A.2d 1

SUNSHINE LAUNDRY CORP. et al. v. WHITE.

No. 136.

Court of Appeals of Maryland.

April 18, 1951.

Philip T. McCusker, Sp. Atty. for State Accident Fund, Baltimore (Hall Hammond, Atty. Gen., on the brief), for appellants.

James P. Bailey, Salisbury (Clark & Hearne and Hamilton P. Fox, Jr., all of Salisbury, on the brief), for appellee.

Before MARBURY, C. J., and DELAPLAINE, COLLINS, GRASON, HENDERSON and MARKELL, JJ.

MARBURY, Chief Judge.

The appellee was a dependent of his daughter, Rosa May Furr, who was killed on March 7, 1950, as a result of an accidental injury arising out of and in the course of her employment with the Sunshine Laundry Corporation. After a hearing, the State Industrial Accident Commission found on June 30, 1950, that he was partially dependent on the deceased, and made him an allowance based on that dependency. He appealed from this order to the Circuit Court for Wicomico County, and there the case was tried before the court and a jury on the issue, 'Was the appellant, Aaron R. White, wholly dependent upon the deceased, Rosa May Furr, at the time of her death on March 7, 1950?' At the conclusion of the testimony, employer and insurer filed a motion for a directed verdict. This was overruled, and the case was permitted to go to the jury which answered the issue, 'Yes.' A motion for a judgment N.O.V., or, in the alternative, for a new trial, was also overruled, and thereafter the employer and insurer appealed. The sole question raised on this appeal is whether the trial court erred in not directing a verdict for the employer and insurer on the issue of total dependency.

In the consideration of a motion for a directed verdict by the trial court, it is the well-recognized rule that all material evidence, with all proper inferences to be drawn therefrom, shall be considered by the court in a manner most favorable to the party against whom the motion is made. When such a question comes here on appeal, it is obvious that we cannot determine whether the ruling of the trial court was correct, or whether a verdict should have been directed, unless we also have before us all the material evidence. That does not mean that every bit of evidence on formal or uncontested matters must be printed by the appellants in their appendix, but it does mean that the appellants cannot select for printing only the items of evidence most favorable to their contention, omitting the remainder of the material evidence.

When we did away with the necessity of printing the entire record on appeal, we gave ample warning to the Bar in the first case in which the question arose that we would not feel ourselves bound to examine the transcript of record to search for additional matters which had not been printed in the appendix. Strohecker v. Schumacher & Seiler, 185 Md. 144, 43 A.2d 208. We followed that warning by deciding a later case on the opinion of the lower court, and the decree. Condry v. Laurie, 186 Md. 194, 46 A.2d 196. In another case appellant printed the testimony in narrative form in the appendix to his brief. The appellee objected to this, and we held that we could not consider the testimony in the narrative form. We declined to reverse the action of the lower court which had directed a verdict for the defendant, or its rulings on evidence, because there was not sufficient printed testimony to enable us to pass upon the questions raised. Butler v. Reed-Avery Co., 186 Md. 686, 48 A.2d 436. In Foley v. Hoffman, 188 Md. 273, 52 A.2d 476, 483, where one of the questions was the proper disposition of defendant's motions for a directed verdict and for a judgment N.O.V., we declined to pass upon the point because...