Decisions: Odors and Ulcers

The law is constantly seeking to adjust to the extraordinary tensions and turbulence of modern life. Two recent decisions:

∙ During 20 years spent chasing tax dodgers for the Internal Revenue Service, Ben Larosa always enjoyed good health. After he retired in 1965, he shifted to teaching, and the ghetto schools of San Francisco, he found, were just too rough. Larosa's students broke into fistfights almost daily, hurled paper clips, and hit him on the head with chalk and textbooks. Soon he had a bleeding ulcer and, on his doctor's advice, quit teaching. Last month, in a landmark ruling affecting a teacher, a California Workmen's Compensation Appeals Board decided that Larosa had "sustained injury arising out of his employment." His award: medical costs and $70 a week.

∙ So malodorous was the air surround ing the Bishop Processing Co. near Bishop, Md., that nausea forced a federal official to flee the area before he could read his Scentometer. Spreading from the plant was the pungent smell of rendered chicken heads, feet, feathers and entrails. Southerly breezes wafted the odor across the state line to the town of Selbyville, Del. After Maryland's efforts to assert control failed, Selbyville citizens began a movement that eventually persuaded the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare to sue Bishop under the 1967 Clean Air Act. The smell of the processing plant, they complained, "deprives the people of life's normal pleasures." Urging that the suit be dismissed, Bishop contended that this was local activity and not a matter for federal control. The U.S. District Court of Maryland disagreed: "Malodorous pollution that adversely affects business conditions and property values clearly interferes with interstate commerce."