(Editors note: Bob Anderson bought a 1969 Charger in 1977 and eventually made it into a ISCA show champion. He sold it in the early 1990s and lost track of it...until recently. This is his — and the Charger’s — story.).

By Bob Anderson

Percy Wickett, a marine biologist at the PBS, bought the car new at Skyline Motors (on Front St., I believe) in Nanaimo. Percy and his wife took the car on one trip across Canada to the Maritimes and back. He told me the only problem he ever had was the constant voltage regulator for the gauges failed one time. The current owner, Rob West, holds the original cash receipt, the bill of sale (I think), a copy of the original registration and the original 1969 licence plates, all of which Percy gave to me in 1982. The original color was metallic silver, a special colour carried over since 1966 when the Charger was first introduced and.....get this......it was LACQUER. The only lacquer offered. No information on why. Percy kept the car until the spring, I think, of 1977. It had developed some rust issues, some from sitting day after day under the fir trees at the PBS. He traded the Charger in at Nanaimo Honda Cars for a new Honda and was sorry he did.

Nanaimo Honda had the car painted black. It was a band-aid at best but a very pretty one. My '72 Mach1 was giving me some trouble, so in August (I believe) of 1977, when I spotted the Charger on Nanaimo Honda's lot, I decided to buy it. Fresh paint and a flawless interior. Full price $3,995. I was fourth in line to buy it but was the only one able to come up with the money. This car was my daily driver until 1981. In Feb. 1980 we moved from Nanaimo to Revelstoke to work on the new hydro-electric dam on the Columbia River. The winters there required a 4x4 so I bought a '77 Ford Short Box 4x4 and put the Charger away in the small two bay garage at the back of our house.

While there, I hooked up with Michael Kukura, owner of Big Bend Auto Body. Since the Charger wasn't being used, it was an opportune time to deal with the rust that had reappeared...no surprise there. As it turned out, Mike was an absolute 'artiste' with a spray gun. Over time, I had accumulated a quantity of NOS sheet metal and I turned Mike loose on the car. I made one trip to Coeur D'alene, Idaho for rust free sheet metal. That's a story in its own right. Mike had earlier become involved with the International Show Car Association and recently finished a '66 or '67 Chevelle for the son of the mayor of Revelstoke at the time. An awesome car, but Shane, the owner, lost interest and Mike and one of his employees took time off to campaign the car on the ISCA circuit, placing 25th overall in the Mild Custom class.

During the course of the body work, Mike and staff became enthused with the project and poured many free hours into it (lucky me!). Focusing on ISCA rules as a guide we based many decisions on the ISCA rule book. One day in the fall of 1982, after the paint was on the car, Mike and I were discussing clear-coating the Dodge R6 red Centari. Urethanes were just becoming available from specialty paint manufacturers. Nothing was resolved at that point so I left and returned the next day. In the meantime, Mike had taken some 1000 grit, wet sanded a portion of a quarter panel and polished it out. It looked awesome. He said, "Let's just paint the car again, block it and polish it out". I agreed and we got the paint on the car, but shortly thereafter, I got laid off from the dam. With no prospects in sight and my son, Travis, due to be born in May of '83, we skedaddled back to Nanaimo. Sometimes, things are just meant to happen. As luck would have it, on phoning our property manager, our tenants had just given their notice so we were able to move right back into our house. This was at the height of the recession of the '80s and there was simply no work. (Story has it there was 80% unemployment in the consulting engineering field).

Putting the car in storage, I built a 28x26 foot garage by expanding and enclosing my carport. When finished, I brought the car home, but little work went on other than some detailing on the car. My EI ran out and we were staring Welfare in the face (another story). We rented out our clear-title house again just to get some cash flow and we moved in with our good friend, Doug; leaving the Charger in storage at our house. My good friend, Wayne, hired me on his seine boat and I fished the dismal 1984 season. In Nov. of 1984, with a couple of bucks in our jeans, we went to Prince Rupert to visit my Mom. While there, I fell into a job at City Hall, where I had previously worked in the Engineering Dept. from '66 - '71.

Still refusing to give up the unfinished Charger, we bought a small modular home and I built a 26x26 attached garage with the help of old friend and "hot-rodder" Bill Bridden, a building contractor in PR. The car languished in the basement of Philpott-Evitt Building Supplies while the garage was being built. The master cylinder had developed a leak and spoiled some paintwork in the engine bay. No silicone or synthetic brake fluid at that time. Unable to do any work on the car, I just kept a bottle of brake fluid in the console. To my chagrine, that $%^*^%&(^&*) DOT3 garbage ate through the cap of the brake fluid container, disintegrating it AND the bottom of my red console!  Of the 50,000 or so Chargers built in '69, only a few had red interiors so little chance of a replacement. The plastic had broken into many shards, very akin to the tiny pieces a car window breaks into when smashed. So, I gathered up all the pieces and neutralized the brake fluid with soap and water. Then, sitting at the kitchen table I proceeded to piece together the jigsaw puzzle that my console bottom had become. Amazing stuff....Crazy Glue. After getting the whole fragile mess together, I reinforced the underside with a liberal coating of epoxy. But I digress.

With a steady job, I once again began accumulationg NOS and repop parts while still detailing the interior, engine bay and undercarriage. In April 1988, after a failed bid on the purchase of Brechin Point Marina in Nanaimo, we decided we had had enough of Prince Rupert and, besides, the car was almost ready for the ISCA Show Circuit. I broke a cardinal rule by quitting my job without another to go to and, with the help of my old skipper, we caravaned my two Chargers (I had a nice '68 daily driver by this time) and a moving van onto the MV Queen of Prince Rupert. My friend Bill met us at Port Hardy with a truck and trailer for the Charger and soon we were home.

Nanaimo was beginning to open up and I, once again, fell into a job with an ex-colleague. I finalized the Charger with a set of (FINALLY available) NORS carpet, trunk mat and set of NORS F70-14 Firestone Redlines from Coker Tire.

Our first ISCA event was a 1A show in Lyndon, Washington in the Fall of 1988. We were total rookies, and had a sick kid with us to boot. Four awards were available for our class, Current Restored. By the time the 2nd place award was given out to a gorgeous '69 Hurst Olds, we figured we were done. But not so. We were stunned when we were called for the 1st in Class award. This set the tone for the upcoming 1989 season and we never, ever took less than 1st in class.

1989 began with a 1A show in Victoria. We took two awards; 1st in Class and Outstanding Detail. Comments and advice from the ISCA judges resulted in my tearing the front sheet metal off the car, stripping and repainting those areas underneath that should have been body color. On restored cars at the time, the ISCA judges seldom looked at the undercarriage. This additional work took me through the summer so I missed a lot of the season. The restoration bar was beginning to rise and I was helping. In September, we attended a 1A show in Prince George. Despite precautions, the sandblasting I'd had to do on the front of the car had taken its toll on my paint and I was NOT happy. However, we still managed to pull two awards; again 1st in Class and Outstanding Detail.

Following Prince George, I spent a lot of time finessing my paint for the 4A show in Portland. Portland was exciting. For a few reasons, we only won 1st in Class, beating a very nice orange '70 Challenger R/T. Re-doing my undercarriage did the trick. His was plain flat black.

Two weeks later was the 5A show, Pacific Division's biggest, at the Coliseum in Seattle. I debated leaving the car in Seattle at a friend's place but decided to take it home for a little more tiddling. On arrival at the Seattle show, we found our main competition was the same '70 Challenger. After beating him again and taking three awards, 1st in Class, Outstanding Detail and Outstanding Paint, he told me he'd just spent $2,500 on his undercarriage, only to lose to us again. I kind of felt for him as his car was very nice.

Overall, the car placed in the Top 30 of all the cars shown in the Pacific Division. In Dec., I went to Sacremento for the Division Finale and came home with armloads of stuff.

ISCA takes the earned points of all the cars in all the classes in all five divisions to determine an overall International Class Champion. To our surprise, we won that distinction, and the Charger became the best restored '58 - '72 car in both Canada and the U.S.

A year or so later, the Charger was featured in Musclecar Classics magazine. We drove and showed the car around Nanaimo for the next few years, picking up the odd award here and there and having a lot of fun. However, by the time 1994 rolled around I was getting antsy about having such a valuable car so decided to sell. 

It didn't take too long before a fellow from Port Alberni contacted me. We met a few times and negotiated the purchase. He didn't recognize the distinction of owning a numbers-matching car with full provenance back to the date of original purchase, so I gave him a crash course. Back in '82, because we needed the car to be mobile while in the body shop, we had left the original motor in the car. While the car was in the body shop in Revelstoke, I rebuilt, painted and detailed a spare 383HP that I had pulled from another '69 Charger and later installed it after the paint was done. I told him I would be perfectly willing to rebuild, detail and install the original motor at no cost to him and I would keep the one that was in the car. He declined. Anyway, he agreed to take the original engine block to protect the car's value as a numbers-match vehicle. I saw him a year or so later at a car show at Beban Park and he had had the car repainted. He told me that the poly shelter he'd had the car sealed up in through successive freeze/thaw cycles had caused melting condensation to drip repeatedly on the same spots all over the top surface of the car causing the bond to fail between the paint and the primer. I gather it was quite a mess. 

We were at a car show in Port Alberni in, I think, '96 or '97 when we were told the buyer had been arrested on murder charges. It was roughly at this point when, for us, the car fell completely 'off the grid'. Rumours had it that the car was in Qualicum Beach but that was based on a sighting that may not even have been this car at all. We also surmised that the car may have gone to the States or even Japan as so many cars were doing around that time. I was fully into the build of my Model A at Wayne's Toy Box and the subject of my old Charger came up occasionally but no one up there had ever seen it.

Then in the fall of 2010 my friend Terry Corsie was in Chemainus on a heat pump quote when he spotted a car under a shelter at a home near Panorama Ridge. He approached the owner and they had a lengthy chat and it came about that this was my car. Terry put me in touch with the owner, Rob West who told me he bought the car from the Port Alberni buyer’s wife about 12 years ago making him only the fourth owner. I told him on the phone he now owns a fairly important car due to its status as an ISCA show champion and numbers-matching car. I went down to take a look at the car and West indicated he would probably be selling the car but since then he got the car running again and may just keep it.