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Hemmings Motor News has been around since 1954. We're proud of our heritage, but we're also more than the Hemmings full of classifieds that your father subscribed to. Aside from new editorial content every month in Hemmings, we have three monthly magazines: Hemmings Muscle Machines, Hemmings Classic Car and Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car.

While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.

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Mystery Lost and Found Car - El Chic-ito

Posted June 21, 2012 9:00 AM by dstrohl
Pathfinder Tags: el-chic-ito mystery car

When I put mystery cars in the Lost and Found column in Hemmings Classic Car every month, I like to have some sort of solid detail for the readers to grab onto, something that might jog distant memories and get them to go through their archives in search of more information about said mystery car. Since roadkillontheweb posted these two photos of a mystery car to the H.A.M.B. last year, I've been looking for anything that might help identify it, only to come up goose eggs. The only thing that might be construed as a hint is the file name of the images: "El Chic-ito." And from what I can tell, that's utter gibberish in Spanish. So I give up. Anybody out there care to provide some - any - details on this car?

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#1

Re: Mystery Lost and Found Car - El Chic-ito

06/21/2012 9:30 AM

Well, el chiquito is 'the little one' or 'the tiny one'. That certainly looks to be an appropriate name for the car.

Looks more like a project car instead of a production model. Windscreen looks like it came off of a boat!

[edit] Never mind, the same observations are made at the blog.

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Re: Mystery Lost and Found Car - El Chic-ito

06/21/2012 2:18 PM

That's Leopold Garcia's homemade buggy...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/67331613@N02/6901510021

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Re: Mystery Lost and Found Car - El Chic-ito

06/21/2012 2:23 PM

SolarEagle, that is a shot from behind the halfcourt line... nothin' but net!

Excellent find!

Now let's hope dstrohl comes back to see this.

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Re: Mystery Lost and Found Car - El Chic-ito

06/22/2012 3:20 AM

Not Garcia's only short car: see http://www.google.com.hk/patents?id=Yc9xAAAAEBAJ&pg=PA1&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. This appears to be his "Citycar", which was displayed at a Ford dealer in1957. He had also built a car for paraplegics. The photo describing the "El Chicito"car as "All Curves" is from Popular Mechanics, November 1956, p 294.

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Re: Mystery Lost and Found Car - El Chic-ito

06/22/2012 7:32 AM

The front fenders appear to have come from a Studebaker R Series Pickup....

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