Companionship & Compensation

In the thousands of damage suits that were settled in U.S. courts last week, the average award to plaintiffs by judge and jury was less than $5,000. Four notable exceptions:

> In Detroit, Michigan's Supreme Court affirmed a circuit court's award of $26,500 for "loss of society and companionship" to the parents of Linda Kay Hopkins, a Michigan State cheerleader killed at 21 in an auto collision five years ago. In rejecting the defendant's pleas that Linda's age made her independent, that her parents' means (they own three thriving Saginaw businesses) entitled them to no more than enough for funeral expenses, the court devised a formula calling for $1,000-a-year damages over the parents' remaining 26.5 years of expected life. For good measure, the court tacked a 5% interest charge (borrowed from admiralty law) on the principal for each year that has passed since the girl's accidental death.

> In Newark, Workmen's Compensation Court Judge Kathryn G. Sugrue ruled that the New Jersey Turnpike Authority derived "a certain amount of benefit" from Maintenance Man Richard Marshall's services as a player on the Authority's softball team. Judge Sugrue awarded Marshall's widow and four children $38,130.04 in compensation for the fatal "on-the-job" heart attack he suffered while giving his all for his turnpike employers in a softball game last summer.

> In Kansas City, a district court jury awarded $110,000 to Mrs. Maxine Cornish, wife of a Pittsburg (Kans.) State College history professor, after it became convinced that her eye damage had been brought on by Aralen, a drug she took to ease her arthritis. Last week the Ohio Supreme Court upheld a lower-court ruling that Columbus Housewife Faye Oppenheimer was not entitled to similar damages because she exceeded the drug's recommended dosage.

Lawyers for the Sterling Drug Co., which produces Aralen, stoutly insisted that Mrs. Cornish was not entitled to damages either, even though she stuck to the prescribed dosage. Her doctor had been warned, said the Sterling lawyers, to examine her eyes periodically. Just as insistent, the doctor said he had been given no such advice.

> In New York, a Supreme Court jury decided that the death of Hotel and Real Estate Magnate Arnold S. Kirkeby, 60, in an American Airlines jetliner crash had deprived his widow and daughter of $1,172,000 in anticipated earnings. Largest in New York negligence history, the Kirkeby award follows an Appellate Division decision that American was solely responsible for the disaster. Still to be heard: claims for as much as $10 million by relatives of at least nine other victims of the same March 1, 1962, crash.

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