This paper predates by about nine months Ralph Nader's seminal book on the same subject, Unsafe at Any Speed, which was published November 29, 1965, but could well have served as an introduction to it.
Like most newspaper offices, ours is a regular port of call for a large and varied assortment of cranks and crackpots who fancy us to be the appropriate mouthpiece for their maledictions against mankind or who hope to find in us a willing vehicle for promoting whatever harebrained schemes they wish to foist upon the public. Some of these earnest but offbeat promoters can be put down as harmless eccentrics, and some are quite obviously psychopaths who belong in institutions.
In the latter category is one local character who, because I made the mistake of listening sympathetically when he first visited the Eagle, has made me his particular confidant. He comes to the office perhaps once a month, and his message is always the same: He is convinced that the Hotel Wendell building is top-heavy, and is in imminent danger of falling down with catastrophic consequences. Moreover he feels there is a conspiracy among our leading citizens to conceal this danger from the public, and he suspects that the conspirators are determined to silence him by fair means or foul.
