NEWPORT BEACH : Birthday Card Gets a Smashing Delivery

A 66-year-old woman who was trying to deliver a birthday card to a friend Friday ended up driving her car through the friend’s living room, crashing into a china cabinet and a bedroom closet, authorities said.

Phyllis Harmon of Newport Beach stopped to place a greeting card in a friend’s mailbox about 11 a.m. when she noticed that the woman was home and decided to make a personal delivery, police said. Harmon lost control of the vehicle as she drove up the driveway, and the car plunged into the living room. The friend and owner of the house, Lorraine Smith, was talking to another friend on the telephone when she said she heard “something like a bomb had exploded.”

“Then I saw this car, it was coming so fast,” said Smith, 72. “If the phone had not rung, I would have been doing my morning exercises in the living room and I would have gotten run over.”

Smith said she hung up the phone and made her way through the smoke and plaster dust to find “my friend in her little voice calling out ‘Lorraine, Lorraine.’ ” The two hugged and Harmon delivered her birthday card. No one was injured.