Staff file photo by Bill Green Emergency personnel and spectators gather Nov. 10, 1979, at the scene of crash on Md. 26. The crash involved a drunken driver, Russell Newcomer, and Cindi Lamb, along with her 5-month-old daughter, Laura.

About noon, a woman was driving west on Md. 26, to a grocery store. A man was speeding toward her on the hilly country road. The woman had a baby beside her. The man was drunk.

Their two vehicles collided just west of Mount Pleasant.

The crash was one of three in the county resulting in injury that day. It was not one of the year's 20 fatal crashes — eight of which involved alcohol — so it did not seem noteworthy. It did not even rate its own headline in the local paper.

But in its aftermath was born a national organization bent on transforming the way governments, law enforcement and citizens of the United States view drinking and driving.

The woman was Cindi Lamb. The baby was her daughter, Laura. The man was Russell Newcomer.

The organization is MADD.

MADD was incorporated in 1980 with two chapters — in California and Maryland. Two years later, it had 100 chapters, By 1984, MADD had become a multimillion-dollar national charity. The federal minimum drinking age was increased from 18 to 21 that year, largely through MADD’s efforts.

In the years since, MADD has become ubiquitous, taking in $44.4 million in fiscal 2008, but spending $47 of every $100 it receives on fundraising, and winning few federal legislative victories since the beginning of this decade.

THE MOTHER

Cindi Lamb awoke that Nov. 10 to a Saturday filled with chores, errands and the family responsibilities of a 24-year-old mother and wife.

Lamb remembers getting ready to go grocery shopping. She considered bringing her older son, but rejected the idea and she decided to bring 5-month-old Laura instead. She thought about taking her Volkswagen Beetle, but opted instead for the family’s new Ford pickup truck, reasoning it would hold more groceries.

The Lambs lived in Unionville, a tiny community east of Libertytown. Most communities in Frederick County were small in 1979. The county population was about 112,000, less than half what it is today. Lamb was going to Frederick to do her shopping, about 14 miles away on that winding two-lane road.

Lamb put Laura in a car seat and strapped her into the front passenger seat. Lamb did not put on a seat belt.

THE DRINKER

Russell Newcomer remembers the day well. He planned to spend it the way he spent most Saturdays: drinking.

Newcomer, then 37, lived in Frederick with his girlfriend and worked as a diesel mechanic. He had two sons, Gary and Tommy, both in high school.

He first went to his sister’s house in Mount Pleasant to replace the brakes on his girlfriend’s Dodge Charger.

After his sister and girlfriend left to go shopping, and he finished working on the car, “I got on the back of my nephew Johnny’s motorcycle, and we headed to the liquor store for a pint,” Newcomer said during a recent interview in his Frederick trailer home.

“It was maybe 9 a.m.”

That might seem early to start drinking, but it was, and still is, a perfectly legal time of day to buy alcohol. According to the Maryland Code, liquor can be sold in Frederick County “from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily, except Sundays.” Kathy Vahle, who has worked at the Frederick County liquor board since 1980, said those hours were in effect long before her tenure.

Though Saturday is the most common day of the week for car crashes, few of those are in the middle of the day. In 2008, only 0.8 percent of the country’s alcohol-related fatal crashes occurred between noon and 1 p.m. Only 6.6 percent of fatal drunken-driving crashes occur between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. About four in 10 fatal drunken-driving crashes take place between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m.

After he finished that first pint of Canadian Mist whiskey, “I went down again by myself to get another one,” Newcomer said.

His driving privileges were revoked and he had multiple DUI arrests on his record — including while on probation for armed robbery. But Newcomer took his girlfriend’s Charger. He was on a roll.

Over the past 30 years, MADD has found that suspending or revoking licenses does little to keep convicted drunken drivers off the roads. Since 2006, the organization has lobbied for mandatory ignition interlocks on vehicles used by those convicted of drunken driving. An interlock measures blood-alcohol content and the vehicle will not start if the driver’s BAC is over a predetermined limit.

A Maryland court may order a driver to operate vehicles equipped with ignition interlock devices for one to three years. If a driver takes someone else’s car, an interlock would have no effect. But other devices are being developed that could become standard in every car — like seat belts and air bags. These devices would passively measure the BAC of anyone attempting to start the car.

From Mount Pleasant, Newcomer drove down Dance Hall Road to Gas House Pike to the old Hitching Post tavern on Seventh Street for a couple of beers. It opened at 9 a.m. on weekends.

He then drove to a liquor store on East Street, bought a third pint of Canadian Mist and headed back east on Md. 26.

“Coming back out 26 toward Mount Pleasant, that’s where the wreck happened,” he said. “Don’t remember too much more. I was pretty well on my way.”

THE CRASH

Md. 26 stretches from Frederick east all the way to Baltimore, passing through several small country towns, some still lined with buildings that date to the 19th century. In 1979, the stretch west of Mount Pleasant was narrow and winding, with almost no shoulders.

The road was widened in 1988, and shoulders were added on both sides.

Though still two lanes, it now looks nothing like the road Cindi Lamb faced that Nov. 10.

“I had just come through Libertytown and had gone up a hill,” she said. “When I got up to the top of the hill, I saw this car at the bottom of the hill, in my lane.”

There was no shoulder and Lamb noticed a big rock on top of the hill.

“I remember thinking there was no place for me to go if he stayed in my lane.”

As Lamb watched the vehicle return to the correct lane, she thought maybe the driver had reached over to change the radio station, or perhaps pick something up off the floor.

Lamb relaxed.

Suddenly, the car was back on her side of the road.

Newcomer first hit a car in front of Lamb, driven by Frederick resident Rosemary Abrecht. Then he hit Lamb’s truck head-on. Lamb estimates she was going 50 to 55 mph, and said police told her Newcomer was doing about 70 mph.

Newcomer’s Charger struck the left side of Abrecht’s car. She spun around, veered off the left side of the road and struck an embankment, a Maryland state trooper reported, according to the Nov. 12, 1979 edition of The Frederick Post.

Newcomer’s car skidded sideways in the westbound lane and hit the right front of Lamb’s pickup head-on. The pickup also struck the embankment.

Trooper First Class John J. Cutter was the first law enforcement officer on the scene.

“I don’t have any notes or the accident report, but I remember it well,” said Cutter, who has since retired.

Newcomer had been convicted of drunken driving in September 1979, and his license was revoked. He later said he had taken his girlfriend’s car without her permission.

INSIDE THE PICKUP

Without a seat belt to restrain her, Lamb went through the windshield twice as her truck was thrown about by the impact.

“It was like being in a blender with steel and glass,” Lamb said.

Knocked unconscious, she startled onlookers when she opened her eyes through the blood streaming down her face.

“I think they thought I was dead, so it was a shock when I opened my eyes,” she said.

She noticed that her new pickup was badly damaged; all the windows had been blown out. She immediately looked for Laura, who had been strapped into an infant car seat beside her.

“The car seat was there, but Laura wasn’t,” Lamb said. “She was on the floor. I’ll never forget she was wearing this puffy yellow jumpsuit. She was crying very lightly. It seemed like she was trying to catch her breath.” Lamb tried to reach for her daughter. She couldn’t move.

“I thought I was paralyzed,” she said. “I kept telling her it would be all right, and it wasn’t all right.”

Upon impact, the straps holding Laura in her car seat snapped. She was thrown forward. Her neck struck the edge of the truck’s dashboard.

Ambulance crews from Libertytown and Walkersville took Cindi and Laura Lamb, Newcomer, Abrecht and Cathy Gulley, Abrecht’s passenger, to Frederick Memorial Hospital, according to The Post. Despite her injuries, Cindi Lamb’s only concern was for her infant daughter.

“I broke about 14 bones from the waist down,” Lamb said. “But I kept asking, ‘How’s Laura, how’s Laura, how’s Laura?’”

In the FMH emergency room, Lamb became aware of a person vomiting profusely in the curtained cubicle next to hers.

“He just kept vomiting and vomiting and I remember thinking that it smelled like alcohol,” she said. “And then a state police trooper came in and told me I had been hit by a drunk driver.” She realized the driver who hit her was the man throwing up next to her.

GUIDELINES

How drunk was Russell Newcomer? And why wasn’t he in jail?

The second of MADD’s signal accomplishments, after raising the national drinking age, was to lower the maximum blood-alcohol content a driver needed before he could be charged. In October 2000, President Bill Clinton signed a national .08 BAC bill into law. Before that, a driver needed a BAC of .10 or higher to be charged.

After three pints of whiskey and a few beers, Russell Newcomer’s BAC on Nov. 10, 1979 — though no record of it could be found in researching this series — would have been well above either limit.

Nor would his prior offenses be more likely to land him in jail — even with today’s sentencing guidelines.

According to Frederick County State’s Attorney Charlie Smith, modern guidelines are designed to increase equity and reduce disparity between sentences among counties, not to make sentencing more harsh. Smith believes the guidelines actually water down sentences in more conservative counties to make up for lenient sentences given in other jurisdictions.

He believes repeat offenders are not treated harshly enough.

In the guidelines, driving while intoxicated is grouped with the least serious offenses, in category VII, Smith explained. Subsequent DWIs remain in that category. Driving under the influence is a category V offense.

“We finally got mandatory minimum sentences for DUIs,” Smith wrote in an e-mail, “but even then if it’s your third or subsequent conviction within 5 years, it’s only 10 days!”

THE INJURIES

Newcomer suffered serious injuries in the crash. He was taken from FMH to Washington County Hospital, where he spent 14 days recovering from head, back and spine injuries. His mother told The Washington Post in 1987 that doctors had said he might not live through the night.

He could not elaborate on his injuries, other than say he “chipped off a part of my spine.” It took months for him to recover completely.

Rosemary Abrecht and Cathy Gully, who could not be reached for this project, were treated at Frederick Memorial Hospital and released, according to the Frederick Post story of Nov. 12. Cindi Lamb had a head laceration that needed to be sutured and multiple broken bones in her lower body. She needed surgery to repair her left foot. When her initial treatment was completed, she found herself in a wheelchair with casts on both legs.

Laura Lamb, the crying baby in the puffy yellow suit, was transferred to the pediatric intensive care unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore; FMH doctors had noticed she was not moving normally. For two days, her mother had no word of her condition.

THE BEGINNING

In 1979, a Georgia peanut farmer was in the third year of his ailing presidency. A shopworn man of steel reappeared in the summer’s blockbuster movie. Six days before the crash on Md. 26, Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 53 people hostage for 444 days. A month before the crash, a nun in the slums of Calcutta won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Tiny Laura Lamb made history, too.

“On the third day, doctors came in to my room and told me Laura was paralyzed from the neck down,” Cindi Lamb said. “They told me that her vertebrae at C-4, -5 and -6 were crushed.

“I think they told me, I screamed, and then they medicated me.”

The doctors operated to relieve the swelling in Laura’s head. No infant so young had ever survived such catastrophic injuries.

But Laura did not die.

She became the world’s youngest quadriplegic.

She also became the first public face of an organization that has spent the past 30 years showing the world how innocent people of all ages can suffer and die as a result of drunken driving: MADD.

Staff members Megan Eckstein, Comfort Dorn, Stephanie Mlot, Meg Tully and Pam Rigaux contributed to this report.