February 26, 1908
THEIR NOISE RUINED
HIS GENTLE HORSE.
SCARED HIS WIFE, HURT HIS
BABY, INJURED HIM.
So Farmer Harnish Sues Members of
the Motorcycle Club for Dam-
ages Done Him Last
Fall.
The Kansas City Motorcycle Club members, nineteen strong, have avoided the road to Greenwood, this county, since November 3. That day eighteen of them were waylaid by a mob of twenty-five farmers armed with stones. Only one escaped. And County Judge George J. Dodd was chief spokesman for the beseiging party.
It all came out yesterday when suit was filed in Justice Young's court by Angie Harnish against the club members for $800 damages.
Harnish, according to the papers filed, was driving in a top buggy with his wife and 2-year-old child to Greenwood, when just at the outskirts of the town the "the defendants in a body known as the Kansas City Motorcycle Club, mounted on motorcycles," bore down on his rear "at high speed," carelessly and negligently running upon and by him, the loud and explosive exhaust noises, frightening until he became unmanagable, the horse, which was "not acquainted with motorcycles."
Harnish attempted to alight to seize the horse's bits, and the lunging of the animal threw him into the rock road. The woman, busy with the lines, dropped the baby between her feet and frantically begged the cyclists to stop for the sake of hersef and the baby. Instead of this it is alleged the cyclists only laughed, and trying to outrun the maddened horses, allowing the whirr of the explosive sounds to continue until the horse and buggy smashed into a fence. The baby and Harnish were seriously bruised, the horse, formerly gentle, was ruined, its owner says, and the harness and buggy broken.
A few hours later, when the cycle club members came back that way, they were helf up with a threat of stoning Only one cyclist had the fear or the nerve to run the gauntlet. The others stopped and took their medicine in the form of threats as to what would happen if they ever came back -- and they haven't been back.
The cyclists say that udge Dodd, though an officer of the law, declared to them that he would take the law into his own hands if they did return. Nineteen of them are named, and the amount asked is $800, half of it for actual damages and half for exemplary damages. The case was set for March 3.
Those named as defendants are: R. D. Martin, president of the club; L. J. Vogel, F. J. Hahn, C. Hanson, J. B. Porter, Ned D. Bahr, O. V. Newby, J. N. Glass, Lloyd C. Shielaberger, Fred Berry, Oscar J. Plummer and Dan Patterson.
Bucknew and Houston are attorneys for the plaintiff, and they furnished the court constable with all the addresses of the defendants.
"I know the eighteen of us should have licked those two dozen farmers if the fight had really got started," said R. D. Martin, president of the club, last night, "but we are always considerate of people we meet, and we told them so then, instead of being ugly."
Labels: animals, buggy, Judges, Lawsuit, motorcycles, organizations
