Ward v. American Car & Foundry Co.
| Decision Date | 08 March 1927 |
| Docket Number | No. 19676.,19676. |
| Citation | 293 S.W. 492 |
| Court | Missouri Court of Appeals |
| Parties | WARD v. AMERICAN CAR & FOUNDRY CO. |
Appeal from St. Louis Circuit Court; Erwin Ossing, Judge.
"Not to be officially published."
A ction by William M. Ward against the American Car & Foundry Company, a corporation. Judgment for plaintiff, and defendant appeals. Reversed.
Watts & Gentry, of St. Louis (G. A. Orth, of New York City, of counsel), for appellant.
Goodman & Stephenson and Henry S. Gocke, all of St. Louis, for respondent.
This is an action for damages, alleged to have been sustained by plaintiff while in the employ of defendant. Plaintiff recovered judgment, and defendant appeals.
There were several assignments of negligence in the petition, but, before the submission of the case to the jury, all except one were withdrawn at the request of defendant.
The assignment of negligence upon which the case went to the jury was the failure of defendant to furnish plaintiff with a reasonably safe place in which to work, in that it had permitted a small track over which trucks were operated to be and remain with one rail elevated above the other to such an extent that, when a truck was stopped thereon, the bed was caused to slant and incline to one side, whereby posts loaded thereon were likely to fall therefrom. Plaintiff was injured by one of the posts falling from a truck load while the same were being unloaded by plaintiff and two other men.
The testimony of the plaintiff was that he was employed by the defendant, and engaged in the work of loading posts on a truck, which would be pushed about 100 to 150 feet from the place where they were loaded to another point, where they were unloaded on the defendant's premises. These trucks were operated over a small track. The posts were about 8 feet long, and 4 or 5 inches square. If the load was too heavy for the men to push, they would have a tractor push the truck from the point where it was loaded to the unloading point. At the place where the trucks were unloaded, and at the time plaintiff received his injury, he and another workman, Marshall Gator, were lifting the posts from the truck and handing them to another worker, who placed them in piles under a shed. Plaintiff was at the south end of the truck, and Gator at the north end. They were lifting these posts off one by one, and handing them to another man under the shed. They had taken several posts off this particular load, when one of the posts fell to the ground. They stooped and picked this post up to hand it to the man under the shed, at which time another post fell from the side of the load and struck the plaintiff's foot, injuring it. Plaintiff said that the track was higher on one side than the other, and that this condition had existed for some time, and that the cause of these posts falling was the uneven track; that before he got hurt men were working on the track, and that the track had been in that condition for two months prior to the time he got hurt; that he had seen many loads of posts fall from other trucks before he was injured; that this happened all along during the time he was working there; that he had seen a whole load of posts fall at one time, sometimes they would fall off the truck at the place where they were being unloaded, and sometimes at other points along the track; that he had seen this happen as many as fifty times; that it happened sometimes once and sometimes twice a day; that he had helped to unload five or six loads at that particular point before he was hurt; that, at the time he received his injury, he was not paying any attention to the posts falling off; that they were unloading the posts at the place where they were directed to unload them by the foreman; that he had been loading trucks for several weeks, and knew how to unload them; that one side of the track was 4 or 5 inches...
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