Williams v. McCrory's Stores Corp.

• Decision Date: 14 January 1954
• Docket Number: No. 70,70
• Citation: 203 Md. 598,102 A.2d 253
• Parties: WILLIAMS v. McCRORY'S STORES CORP.
• Court: Maryland Court of Appeals

Page 598

203 Md. 598

102 A.2d 253

WILLIAMS v. McCRORY'S STORES CORP.

No. 70.

Court of Appeals of Maryland.

Jan. 14, 1954.

William L. Wilson, Cumberland (Edward J. Ryan, Cumberland, on the brief), for appellant.

W. Earle Cobey, Cumberland (C. William Gilchrist, Cumberland, on the brief), for appellee.

Before SOBELOFF, C. J., and DELAPLAINE, COLLINS, HENDERSON and HAMMOND, JJ.

DELAPLAINE, Judge.

This action was brought in the Circuit Court for Allegany County by Mollie Williams, widow, age 75, to recover damages for personal injuries which she sustained in a fall from a revolving stool in the store of McCrory's Stores Corporation in Cumberland.

The accident occurred on May 12, 1952, at 11:30 a. m. On that morning plaintiff made a trip from her home in Gilmore to Cumberland; and, after buying some articles in defendant's store, she went to the restaurant counter for lunch. In front of the counter is a long line of stools. At the base of the counter is a ledge. Plaintiff, who weighed about 125 pounds, testified that just as she put her foot on the ledge to push herself under the counter the stool tilted and she fell to the floor.

Defendant maintained that there was no defect whatever in the mechanism of the stool, and that it would have been impossible for the stool to tilt. Charles H. Tidwell, the manager of the store, testified that soon after plaintiff fell he made a notation of her explanation of how she happened to fall, namely: 'I lost my balance as the stool turned.' The manager and his assistants rendered the injured woman first aid and entered her in a hospital within 30 minutes.

At the conclusion of the testimony, the trial judge granted defendant's motion for a directed verdict. Plaintiff is now appealing from the judgment entered on that verdict.

Plaintiff contends that, even if she did not produce any direct evidence proving a specific act of negligence, she established a prima facie case of negligence by the rule of res ipsa loquitur. This rule is that where the plaintiff in an action for injury caused by negligence has offered legally sufficient evidence to support the inference that the injury arose from want of due care, the defendant is prima facie guilty of negligence if the thing or condition which produced the injury was under the management and control of the defendant, and the occurrence was such as does not happen in the ordinary course of events when due care is exercised. Frenkil v. Johnson, 175 Md. 592, 604, 3 A.2d 479; Greeley v. Baltimore Transit Co., 180 Md. 10, 22 A.2d 460; Hickory Transfer Co. v. Nezbed, Md., 96 A.2d 241.

Herries v. Bond Stores, 231 Mo.App. 1053, 84 S.W.2d 153, is an illustration of the rule. In that case a customer in a store accepted the invitation of a salesman to sit in a chair, and the chair collapsed and threw her backwards. The Court pointed out that the collapse of the chair under the plaintiff's normal weight of 126 pounds was most unusual; that she could not be charged with any negligence by any stretch of the imagination; and that the presumption arose that the defective condition of the chair was due to the defendant's negligence.

The rule was also applied in Gow v. Multnomah Hotel, 191 Or. 45, 224 P.2d 552, 228 P.2d 791, where a stool broke and threw the occupant to the floor.

Another illustration is Schueler v. Good Friend North Carolina Corporation, 231 N.C. 416, 57 S.E.2d 324, 21 A.L.R.2d 417, where a customer in a store sat on one of a row of chairs attached together, and the whole row toppled over backward.

Those typical cases, however, are entirely different from the case before us. Here it is contended by defendant that plaintiff simply lost her balance and fell, and that there was no defect in any part of the stool. The rule of res ipsa loquitur is limited by the following considerations: (1) The apparatus must be such that in the ordinary instance no injurious operation is to be expected unless from a careless construction, inspection or user; (2) Both inspection and user must have been at the time of the injury in the control of the party charged; and (3) The injurious occurrence or condition must have happened irrespective of any voluntary action at the time by the party injured. 9 Wigmore on Evidence, 3d Ed., sec. 2509.

The manager of defendant's store testified that the stools at the restaurant counter are the finest money can buy. Ralph Lamade, Jr., a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and mechanical engineer for the Celanese Corporation, expressed the opinion as an expert witness that the type of stool in defendant's store is 'one of the more stable designs' in use today.

The mechanical engineer described the mechanism of the revolving stool as follows:

'This stool consists of a plywood base, from which the spring and the seat are built up. There is padding and the springs underneath this cover. There is a plastic slipover cover over all of this, covering it up. * * * From the plywood base we have what might be termed a spindle, which is mounted on the bottom of the seat itself. The spindle has three arms which are mounted at 120 degrees apart, or one-third of a circle. These irons are bolted to the plywood base. * * * There are three nuts holding each one of these bolts to the arm. These bolts extend one inch below the plywood base, and, I might add, are quarter-inch regular standard blots. From there we have the shank of the spindle, which itself is turned to three different diameters,...