Crusader for Quiet

Despite his optimistic, convivial manner, Robert Alex Baron, 49, knows true frustration all too well. For three years he has waged a lonely, almost quixotic war on the steadily mounting crescendo of urban noise.

His battlefield: New York City. "It is a laboratory," Baron explains. "Every noise source in the U.S. can be found here in larger amounts." His success: meager. "The big problem is communication," he says. "When air pollution was shown actually to kill people, there was action. Fortunately or unfortunately, we cannot show a direct cause-and-effect relationship between excessive noise and death."

But why wait until Americans are pulverized and bloodied by too much noise? If it is loud and continuous, 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."

Noise, of course, is everywhere. With all appliances roaring, a modern kitchen can generate louder noise than a factory; both exceed the volume that most experts believe will impair hearing. In some offices, the constant staccato of typewriters and calculators is so nerve-racking that employees quit after a short time on the job. (New York's First National City Bank neatly resolved that problem by hiring deaf clerical help in its check-processing department.) City streets, already filled with roaring trucks and buses, are made intolerable by the added din of construction. Even when people sleep, they hear and react to noise, which makes them tired, tense and irritable in the morning.

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, Inc.

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 and roaring construction equipment.

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.

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