Randy Krup has a little-bitty car with a whopper of a story behind it.
The long and winding tale of Krup’s beautiful 1937 Fiat Topolino coupe actually has two parts. He has owned the car twice, and somehow car and owner just seemed destined to wind up together.
Krup, a resident of Roscoe, Ill., is 77 now, and he bought the Fiat the first time when he was just 13. The two parted ways a few years later, but they are now together again and Krup says he’ll never let the car go a second time.
“When I was 13 years old, I saw this car sitting at a Shell gas station in Rockford, and we kept driving by this station,” remembers Krup. “Of course, I wasn’t old enough to drive, but I had friends that were older than I was and they could drive and finally I decided, ‘Why don’t you pull in there? I want to see what they are doing with this old car.’ I came from a family that restored antique and classic cars, so I started probably when I was 8, 9, 10 years old out in the garage every Saturday and Sunday. The first car we ever restored was a 1911 Overland. So I had always been around cars and I wanted to see what this little old car was about.
“So I stopped in and asked
