Sometimes there’s a very good reason why they don’t make cars like they used to, and this is one of those times.
In 1963, Arthur Lampitt was in a car crash so severe that an Illinois radio station thought it was a fatality. While Lampitt’s broken hip healed, there was still something not quite right with his arm.
Now 75, Lampitt of Granite City, Ill. had the problem in his arm fixed on New Year’s Eve – a turn signal to a 1963 Ford Thunderbird has finally been extracted, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
A surgeon removed the 7-inch lever from Lampitt’s arm more than a decade after his arm apparently set off a courthouse metal detector. A subsequent X-ray showed there was something in his arm about the size of a pencil, but Lampitt said it caused him no pain. Until a few weeks ago, that is, when his arm reportedly started to bulge.
Those who wonder why controls and stalks are recessed and designed to break away can understand after this man lived with a turn signal stalk in his arm for half a century.
Lampitt told the newspaper he might make the turn signal lever into a keychain.