Milauckas v. Meyer

In the spring of 1961, the plaintiff Joseph J. Milauckas, who owned a motel with frontage on Lake Michigan, hired the defendants, Willard and Gerard Meyer, to drive pilings for the erection of a retaining wall on the beach. The machinery which the defendants used was a crane with a boom 35 to 40 feet in length; suspended from.the end of the boom by a cable was a device called “leads” consisting of two parallel vertical steel beams, joined on the side facing the cab of the crane by small horizontal steel pieces. Sliding in this vertical track between the uprights was a steel cap which fitted…