Cheech’s ’55 Chevy Convertible Is on the Block in East L.A.

Jaime Martinez walked around and around the shiny 1955 Chevrolet, studying the coral and ivory convertible as if in disbelief.

“If they gave me the choice of a 1987 Porsche turbo or this one,” the Inglewood engineering student finally said, “I’d take this one.”

Martinez’s opinion reflected the enthusiasm the 32-year-old car has generated since Latino entertainer Cheech (“Born in East L.A.”) Marin donated it to Santa Marta Hospital in East Los Angeles several months ago.

Martinez saw the car in the Eagle Rock Plaza shopping mall, where the hospital displayed it to sell $2 tickets for a May 21 raffle. The hospital hopes to raise $80,000 on the car to benefit a new early breast-cancer detection center. Thus far, volunteers have sold $5,000 in tickets.

Marin, 40, of the team of Cheech and Chong, lives in Malibu, but says donating the car made him feel at home in East Los Angeles for the first time.

Grew Up Downtown

Interviewed at his Sherman Oaks production company office, the comedian said that despite the title of his hit video and although his parents are of Mexican descent, he grew up in a predominantly black downtown Los Angeles neighborhood and moved at age 10 to a mixed area in Granada Hills.

“Only English was spoken in our house,” he said. “My parents would speak Spanish with my grandparents when they didn’t want me to understand.”

Even after he drove the car through scenes on Soto Street and Whittier Boulevard in “Born in East L.A.,” parodying Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” Marin said he felt no relationship with East Los Angeles.

The feeling changed when he visited the 110-bed Santa Marta Hospital twice and appeared with the car at a park, a shopping center and a restaurant.

“It led me to get involved,” said Marin, who recently relearned Spanish and speaks it with his daughter, 7, and son, 1. “I know more about their problems and it’s like coming home.

“There’s a whole side of East Los Angeles that’s never been portrayed. There’s very settled family areas to raise your kids. There’s gangs and drugs and everything, but those are everywhere. . . .

“There should be a lot of pride in the community because it has as much history as any part of Los Angeles.

“I see these young people with kids and imagine my grandparents and how they were and it’s a nice sense of continuity.”

Many keepers of that continuity have been born at Santa Marta since it opened in two houses in 1924 as a 10-bed maternity hospital. The current beige three-story building was built on the same site in 1970.

In the lobby, where La Opinion and Noticias del Mundo are sold at the front desk, most patients who come in are from the surrounding neighborhood.

Marin seldom visited the neighborhood in previous years. He kept the Chevrolet, a gift from his former wife, in his two-car Malibu garage for 10 years, putting the top down occasionally to take his family for a drive along the coast.

“Seeing the car would make people happy,” he said. “People used to give me the thumbs up sign. . . . Who wouldn’t like to get one of them? With the top down, the sun out and the radio going, it’s like California dreaming.”

Sea-Salt Rust

When Marin’s new wife, Patti, wanted to put her car in the garage, Marin worried that outside sea salt would rust his everyday 1985 Mercedes or the Chevrolet.

His wife suggested he donate the car to charity. Marin recalled a newspaper story he had read about Santa Marta and the hospital gladly accepted the car, which is worth between $12,000 and $15,000, according to Rick Cole Auctions in North Hollywood, a large seller of collector’s autos.

On a recent visit to the hospital, Marin was mobbed by patients and staff, including the white-robed Catholic Daughters of St. Joseph who run the hospital.

A mother of six asked Marin to talk to her teen-age son who used drugs. Although the comedian made several movies that treated drugs humorously, he advised the youth to avoid narcotics.

‘Never That Stoned Out’

“Because I portrayed a stoned-out character doesn’t mean that I am, and I never really was that stoned out,” he said.

“Those (movies) were in order to show that there’s a funny side, too, but I don’t think there’s a funny side anymore. The destructive side has been shown.

“There’s a world of difference between hippies passing a joint and being able to cop crack in any city in the U.S.”

The mother of the teen-ager was one of a horde of neighborhood volunteers who sold raffle tickets.

At the Eagle Rock Plaza, Martinez said he knew what he would do if he won the raffle.

“The first place I’d take this car is down Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles,” he said. “It’s a cruising car. As long as I can remember when I was small in the ‘60s, Whittier Boulevard was Los Angeles.”

Martinez said he had watched Cheech and Chong since grade school.

“Cheech is all right,” he said. “When I was growing up, they used to stereotype Mexicans like the Frito Bandito in commercials. At the same time I’d see Cheech and his cholo (neighborhood tough) image. I didn’t mind at all. He was the only one I let sort of joke about our background. Everyone else (who portrayed a stereotype), I’ve got something (critical) to say.”