Smith v. Pickwick Stages System

This is an appeal by the defendant, Pickwick Stages System, a corporation, from a judgment entered against it upon the verdict of a jury in the sum of $1500.

Plaintiff, Mildred Vera Smith, brought this action for damages, charging that she was severely injured in the Union stage station of defendant in San Francisco, through the carelessness and negligence of the driver of one of defendant’s stages.

The facts necessary for a correct understanding of the questions involved on this appeal, and which are practically uncontradicted, may be thus briefly stated: On the morning of January 15, 1927, the plaintiff went to the depot of defendant in San Francisco for the purpose of meeting her mother, who had written plaintiff that she would arrive in San Francisco from Los Angeles on a Pickwick stage. Her mother arrived in one of appellant’s stages, and was met in the waiting-room of said station by plaintiff. Mrs. Dobson the mother, had lost her purse and thought she had left it in the stage. Plaintiff and Mrs. Dobson went through a door which separates the waiting-room from the part of the station where the stages enter and discharge their passengers, called “the unloading room”, and…