The Plank at Ronkonkoma
On 3 July 1928, John Joseph Geary was forty-nine years old, a waiter at a Manhattan restaurant described in court testimony as one of the city's smart establishments, where his weekly earnings averaged eighty dollars — well above the wages of most working men. He had been in America for twenty-eight years by then, having crossed from Queenstown in May 1900 on the SS Teutonic, one of many Connemara emigrants moving between the Galway islands and New York in those years. He had married Bridget Lyden at Holy Cross Church on West 42nd Street in April 1906. He had four children. He had owned property at 60 11th Street in Ronkonkoma, Suffolk County, since at least 1911, keeping his Suffolk holding while his city work sustained the family. He was, at the Ronkonkoma station that July afternoon, a man in the middle of a life he had spent three decades assembling.
The train was slowing for the stop when it happened. One of the trainmen, working in the combination baggage and passenger car, picked up a wooden plank and moved to throw it from the open door. The plank was being transported to Ronkonkoma by the train's conductor, John W. Badye. As Geary was passing through the car, the plank struck him in the head. It struck a woman passenger as well.
Illustration: Struck by Railroad Tie, Long Island R.R., Lake Ronkonkoma, L.I., July 1928
The initial injury was a fracture at the base of the skull. In the months that followed, physicians determined that the fracture had produced something worse: atrophy of the brain — described in court testimony as "shrinkage or warping of the brain" — and the disease, they testified, was progressive in nature.
He could no longer work as a waiter.
On 27 December 1928, five months after the accident at Ronkonkoma, John Geary filed his petition for naturalization at the Southern District Court in Manhattan. He had taken out his Declaration of Intent two years earlier, in October 1926, and the process was already underway when the plank came through the baggage car door. The injury had not dissuaded him from continuing to pursue it.
He brought suit against the Long Island Railroad for $150,000 in damages. By November 1930 the case appeared on the December term calendar of the Suffolk County Supreme Court at Riverhead — listed as "John Geary vs. Long Island Railroad Co., negligence," brief and undifferentiated, wedged between a personal injury case and a dispute over an insurance premium. It came before Justice Lewis L. Fawcett the following spring. Stanley Fowler served as trial counsel for Geary; his attorneys of record were Robbins, Wells and Walser of Bay Shore. The railroad retained Thomas J. Brennan of Brooklyn as its counsel. Both sides summoned surgeons and X-ray experts. The jury heard testimony about encephalograms, ventriculograms, ventriculography — terms the Patchogue Advance noted, with some dryness, that the jury had "properly digested."
It was understood the railroad had offered $5,000 to settle.
Geary refused.
On 21 May 1931, the jury returned a verdict of $18,500. Brennan moved immediately to set aside the verdict on the ground that it was against the weight of the evidence. Justice Fawcett denied the motion. The Brooklyn Citizen, the Brooklyn Times Union, the Patchogue Advance, and the Port Jefferson Echo all carried the story on their front pages the following week. The Patchogue Advance identified the detail that appeared to have weighed with the jury: that Geary had been a large wage earner — eighty dollars a week at a smart restaurant — and that since the plank struck his skull, he could no longer carry on that occupation.
John died on 21 March 1959 at Brookhaven, of heart disease. He was seventy-nine years old. He is buried at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Coram — section 5, row G, plot 179 — beside his sister Sarah.
Sources
Brooklyn Citizen, 21 May 1931, p. 1
Brooklyn Times Union, 22 May 1931, p. 13
Patchogue Advance, 22 May 1931, p. 1
Port Jefferson Echo, 29 May 1931, p. 1
Suffolk County News (Sayville), 28 November 1930, p. 1
Individual Summary Report, John Joseph Geary (1879–1959), Family Historian 7, compiled by Terry Fitzgerald, 19 May 2026