Story Archive

Cars Get under Your Skin

“You know what it’s like with a child,” said Betty Lampitt. “You know it’s in your womb, but it’s not until the miraculous birth occurs that you feel the reality of it.” But it wasn’t Betty Lampitt that was in the hospital bed: it was her husband, Arthur, and what emerged from his body was a piece of his old 1963 Ford Thunderbird. He drove it into a truck — in 1963. His arm injuries, back then, looked minor next to his broken hip. But decades later, a courthouse metal detector spotted something in his arm, and when Arthur Lampitt looked at post-crash pictures of his T-bird, he noticed its turn-signal lever was gone. Sure enough, when his arm started bulging and a St. Louis hand surgeon cut it open, the seven-inch lever, now corroded, came out. Lampitt said he might make it a key chain. (AC/St. Louis Post-Dispatch) ...His new car says if it has to drive him into a truck to compete with the old T-bird, that’s what it’s going to do.