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Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Part:         Session:         Page of 731

He came in to murder me. I wasn't there, but had gone to the washroom. It's literally true that I had. He came in and my two secretaries were in the outer room typing. This fellow had a case all right. He was a man who was some kind of a construction worker working on an excavation upstate. He had been hit on the head with a bucket. He was unconscious, bled from the nose, mouth and ears - typical concussion symptoms. They'd paid him workmen's compensation immediately. He was covered. They paid for the time he was ill. Then he got better. When he was better and healed up, they stopped paying him. They said he was all right. He tried to go to work, but nobody would keep him. He began to have all these mental troubles. He got worse and worse mentally.

Then somebody made a claim - he, his wife or his doctor - that his condition of great irritability, irritation, flights of fancy, instability and so forth was the result of having been hit on the head by a steel bucket weighing so many hundred pounds. I forget what it was, but it was quite a blow. He bled from all the orifices. “But,” said the insurance company, “certainly not.” They brought in a lot of expert testimony to the effect that he was a “constitutional mental inferior.” They brought in





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