Word: barone
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...doctors know, noise irreparably damages the microscopic hair cells that transmit sound from the ear to the brain, thus causing hearing loss. In addition, it almost certainly affects blood pressure, heartbeat, and virtually every bodily function, and may have much to do with emotional ailments as well. Sums up Baron: "It is a form of persecution...
Acoustic Anarchy. In 1965, Baron was jolted awake every morning by a barrage of air compressors at a construction site near his Manhattan apartment. He decided to fight. "I found that there was no ordinance limiting the racket between 7:30 a.m. and 5 p.m.," he recalls. "Something had to be done about this acoustic anarchy." He left his job as manager of a Broadway play and by 1966 had established a volunteer organization called Citizens for a Quieter City...
Nine out of ten complaints about noise in the U.S. cannot be handled by existing legislation, Baron claims. Few states and cities have restrictions on noise, and the Federal Government only last July took its first small step toward quiet. As a condition of getting or keeping federal contracts, companies must follow new Department of Labor rules controlling excessive noise in factories. So far, Baron's lobbying in New York helped persuade Mayor John Lindsay to appoint a special task force on noise control. Its recommendations include such specific-and belated-moves as a crackdown on rumbling trucks...
Muffled Bellow. By contrast, Europe is far ahead of the U.S. in noise abatement. Two years ago, Baron imported a muffled air compressor from Germany. With a well-honed sense of the dramatic, he demonstrated it beside the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center. Though the machine did not operate sotto voce, neither did it bellow. One U.S. manufacturer, Ingersoll-Rand, was sufficiently impressed to start producing a similar line of quiet compressors (from $30 to $4,500 more expensive than the unmuffled varieties...
...Baron knows that most manufacturers will not produce such equipment unless assured of a large market. Nor will users buy it unless compelled to by law. He therefore devotes his time to publicizing the dangers of noise, hoping to push legislators into enacting effective new noise-abatement regulations. Until such laws are passed and enforced, however, all Baron can offer his fellow sufferers is silent sympathy...