More and more it appears that people are losing their tolerance for noise. If there were such a thing as a noise barometer, it would reach "Violence" on the scale of reactions. The chopping of air compressor hoses at construction sites, the shooting of bullets at low-flying jets, the actual murder of a horn-tooting motorist-these are but a few of the more startling individual incidents of violence brought on by an excessive noise problem and a frustrated citizenry.
Militant protest is becoming widespread. Noisy patrons emerging from a Paris restaurant so irritated a tenant of the building, he took his rifle and wounded five men and women.
Jet noise has provoked bomb threats and assaults with a variety of projectiles. A mother of three, living near Kennedy Airport, allegedly telephoned a threat to bomb the control tower. "I couldn't stand it anymore, the low-flying jets," she told a reporter. "They frightened my children, rattled the house, made me a nervous wreck." Would milk of magnesia have relieved her tension?
A $20,000-a-year business executive, naively believing he was buying an escape from city noise, purchased a farm home near Dayton. To his extreme annoyance, he found himself under the flight path of low-flying Air Force jets. Unable to secure any accommodation, he took five shots at the jets. He was placed on probation, and forced to move.
The most publicized incident is the one involving artist Helmut Winter, the "Kartofel Werfer" of suburban Munich. Winter suddenly found his home under the flight path of low-flying Luftwaffe and U.S. Air Force jets. When his complaints, like the Dayton man's, were to no avail, he built a modified version of the Roman ballista, a sort of powerful slingshot, and used this device as an anti-aircraft gun—loading it, however, with potato dumplings instead of shells. The frightening plop of dumpling on fuselage did what all else had failed to do: it got the flight path changed. Winter became an international hero. He won the acclaim of noise victims around the world because he had acted out—in his own fashion—what they probably had fantasized for years.
Auto horns appear to be exceptional provokers of violence. On a December day in 1966, one motorist picked an unfortunate place to honk his horn, outside a trailer camp where an obviously mentally-disturbed tenant kept a gun. The horn-happy driver was silenced, forever, with a bullet, and the sniper, after shooting it out with the police, committed suicide. He left a note explaining, "Every day from 4:00 to 6:00 P.M. the constant honking of horns made life unbearable for everyone, including me." One wire service story noted that the radio in the killer's trailer was blaring at the time of the incident. An attempt to mask the passing horns?
Shortly after I opened the office of CQC a friendly police official tipped me off that Con Edison* had received an unsigned typed letter threatening to "get" the jackhammer operator on Sixth Avenue who started up at such an early hour every morning on a street-opening project. No, it was not my typewriter.