Flipping channels, I stopped on a cop show rerun - a police pursuit of a young couple running lights, hopping curbs and then screeching to a stop in front of an ER. The wife spilled onto the sidewalk…and delivered a baby. Awwww. Ok, they were drug dealers, but it got me thinking about Moms and the cars that drove them to give birth. Since it is Mother’s Day, I decided to poke around for stories of Moms, newborns and the cars they rode in on.
Cadillac
In a Boston suburb in 1962, Mrs. Castignetti went into labor with child number five, and she knew she had to act fast. A four-time Mom’s labor can be short, so the Castignettis jumped into their 1959 silver Cadillac Sedan Deville and took off. With HP and weight comparable to, say, today’s Nissan Titan, the 1959 Sedan Deville was part of an elite club of GM luxury cars from an era where a spectacular bottle of Bordeaux would be called “the cadillac of wines”. But it wasn’t just glamorous, it was wild. How Stuff Works wrote, “What can’t be disputed is that the 1959 Cadillacs, defined by those saber-edged fins and projectile taillamps, are among the most evocative objects of the 20th Century. What precisely they evoke is open to interpretation, and that’s part of the magic.” So it should surprise no one that of the 16 newborns at the hospital, the youngest Castignetti really stood out. Through the maternity window, amidst a sea of only pink blankets, Albert Castignetti slept right in the middle, wrapped in blue. An early standout, Albert Castignetti eventually became Vice President and General Manager of the Nissan Division, maker of, among other vehicles, the Titan.
