Driver Becomes Doctor, Then Daddy

Gene and Kay Damiano had a clear understanding from the start of Kay’s pregnancy. Gene was not going to take part in Lamaze classes. And he definitely was not going to be present in the delivery room.

“Gene gets kind of uncomfortable seeing people in pain,” Kay Damiano, 30, explained.

“We agreed that I wouldn’t have to get involved in that kind of stuff,” Gene, 56, added.

But so much for prenatal pacts.

Gene and Kay were at the intersection of Vanowen Street and White Oak Avenue when the blessed moment arrived. Kay asked Gene to pull over. Gene asked her to “hold on” for a few more minutes. Kay shouted at Gene to pull over. Gene obeyed.

No time to call for help, Gene saw. Relying on what he had seen in the movies, Gene Damiano delivered his daughter in the back seat of his newly upholstered Lincoln Continental parked in the middle of a scruffy mini-mall parking lot.

Mother and baby were doing well Friday, their first day back in their Woodland Hills home. Dad was still shaking his head in wonder.

“Well, I guess not every little girl can say her father delivered her,” Gene said. “It certainly was an amazing, emotional day.”

Kay Damiano was already seven days past due on Tuesday. Gene, an attorney who works in Beverly Hills, had cleared his calendar and had stayed home most of last week to be on hand when the time came.

“We are very precise people,” Gene said. “Kay was all packed. We were all ready.”

But the baby wasn’t.

By Tuesday, Gene had to go to work. Kay, feeling fine, said she proceeded with her daily chores. After she picked up her 11-year-old daughter, Misty, from school, she took a nap. At 2:30 p.m. she awoke to labor pains and called Gene.

Wasn’t Crying Wolf

“He told me he was with a client, and he would call me right back,” Kay said. “I had cried wolf a couple times before, so I don’t think he really thought I was in labor. I finally called him back and told him he better finish up and get home.

Gene arrived 45 minutes later and asked if he had time to wash up.

“I’m saying hurry up, Gene, hurry up,” Kay said.

It was pouring rain, Gene said. He encountered bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Ventura Freeway and opted to take side streets to Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys. But the side streets, too, were jammed with traffic. He heard his wife’s breathing and sighs becoming more intense.

“I’m saying, ‘Oh, my God, this can’t be happening to me.’ I said, ‘Kay, Kay, don’t do this to me, honey. Can’t this baby wait until we get to the hospital?”

“Pull over, Gene!” Kay recounted saying.

“Can’t you hold on?” Gene asked.

“Are you kidding me?” Kay remembered shouting.

When Gene saw that it was too late even to call paramedics and realized that “I was going to have to do it myself,” he said, a calm came over him.

As he knelt in the back seat beside his wife to deliver his daughter, he remembered thinking: “I got the best doctor, the best hospital room. I got $2,000 worth of furniture in a nursery. Why is my baby being born in a parking lot strewn with beer cans?”

When the baby emerged, Gene said, he used a piece of television-taught knowledge of the birth process: “I picked her up and patted her behind.”

The baby took a breath and started to cry. The family and its newest member drove off to the hospital.

Hospital officials listed “Gene Damiano” under attending physician on his daughter’s birth certificate. He jokes that he saved about $1,000 in hospital delivery fees.

His 9-pound, 12-ounce girl is still unnamed.

“I know one thing for sure,” Gene said. “We are definitely not going to call her Vanowen or White Oak.”