1989—“Kreimer’s odor prevents staff member from completing copying task.” So reads the day’s entry in the logbook that the Morristown, New Jersey, public library has set up to chronicle the disturbances caused by Richard R. Kreimer, a homeless man who frequently camped out in the library, was belligerent and disruptive, stared at and followed library patrons, talked loudly to himself and others, and had an odor so offensive that it prevented areas of the library from being used by patrons and from being worked in by library employees.
Some two years later, poetically pronouncing that “one person’s hay-fever is another person’s ambrosia,” federal district judge H. Lee Sarokin will rule that the library is a traditional public forum like a street or sidewalk, that the library’s policies are overbroad and vague in violation of the First Amendment, and that they violated substantive due process, equal protection, and the New Jersey constitutional guarantee of free expression. (See This Day for May 22, 1991.) The stench produced by Sarokin’s opinion will ultimately be dispelled by a unanimous Third Circuit ruling rejecting each of Sarokin’s grounds.