PLEASANT PRAIRIE — For more than two decades, Doug Pauschert longed to own a 1969 Dodge Charger R/T SE.

Eleven years ago, he finally got the one now parked in the garage alongside a 1970 Plymouth Road Runner, a very close cousin of the Charger.

A Pleasant Prairie resident, Pauschert graduated high school in 1969. Now 58, he put in 38 years with American Motors Corp. and Chrysler, which bought AMC in 1987. He retired last year.

“I’d been looking for 20 years for (a ’69 Charger R/T). My friend in high school, Randy Sieberlich, had one, and I liked it,” Pauschert said, walking a visitor around his gleaming, “triple black” ’69 Dodge Charger R/T SE, which features a leather interior and wood-grained steering wheel. “It’s the same one I would have ordered out of high school, but my insurance man said with my driving record at the time, I was lucky to even be driving.”

A six-year restoration

The classic muscle car was considerably less high-gloss when he first laid eyes on it in September 1998 on a farm in Alberta, Canada.

“This car sat in a corn crib from 1978 to 1996. It was so dusty when I got it. It was caked with dust,” said Pauschert, who towed the Charger back to Kenosha County and spent six years — and lots of cash — masterfully restoring it. “As soon as I got home, I took this car, put it over here (the working area of his garage) and put it on a rotisserie,” he said.

The “rotisserie” enabled tilting and turning the car every which way, facilitating tear down and the rebuild.

“I completely stripped it down, sent all the panels — everything that’s metal that’s painted — to a New Berlin paint-stripping shop. When that was all done, I sent the body up to them. The body was acid dipped,” explained Pauschert , who still was working as a material handler for Chrysler at the time.

He had the painting done by somebody else but did the chrome work himself.

“My older boy, Kelly (now 33), helped me. Without his help, I couldn’t have got this done,” said Pauschert. Wife Pam Gale also played a significant role.

“My dear wife, having the patience, knowing I was restoring a car, knowing where all my resources went, a lot of times she ran to get parts for me while I was working on it,” Pauschert said, smiling and shaking his head.

The bills easily ran more than $40,000 start to finish from 1999 to 2005, according to Pauschert. “I never added it up because I didn’t want my wife to know. I don’t think I wanted to know,” he said, grinning. “This hobby is not cheap anymore. It never was.”

That partly explains why he doesn’t plan a similar restoration for the classic Road Runner, although the car runs fine.

Under the Charger hood, a blue-printed 426-cubic-inch hemi engine Pauschert had custom built and stroked out to 477 cubic inches, replaced the 383-cubic-inch motor in the car when he bought it. The new power plant alone, with its $13,000-plus price tag, accounts for a goodly portion of the money pile he put into the car, as did his stickler’s insistence on using so-called “new old stock” — NOS in auto restoration parlance — to replace pieces when needed. The NOS grill surround, for example, cost $1,400.

“At the time, I was working a lot of overtime, and the overtime pretty much covered the cost. One year, I had 1,000 hours of overtime,” said Pauschert, whose Charger has snagged Best of Show and Best of Class trophies. Pauschert discovered the original factory production sheet under the rear seat springs while taking the car apart. A framed photocopy hangs on a garage wall with other memorabilia from the ’60s and ’70s, not all of it car-related.

Despite all the dollars and hours invested in it, all the meticulous care and attention to detail, the Charger doesn’t get cream-puff treatment. In fact, with its powerful motor, a crankshaft bigger than the standard original crank, a 5-band automatic transmission and Bullet Proof Dana 60 racing rear end, the Charger has turned the Great Lakes Dragaway quarter-mile in 13.11 seconds with Pauschert at the wheel.

“That’s what I built it for,” he said. “These are big, honking cars. They’re 4,000 pounds. It’s fun to drive. I put a small cam in it, and I built the engine so it could run on gas from the pump not on racing fuel. All so I could drive it on the street. That’s the fun of it. It probably puts out 550 horsepower.”