Above, Paul Ponte, with his 1968 Mercury Montego, that he restored. Below, some of his models.

The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

FALL RIVER, Mass. Paul Ponte has a metallic green 1968 Mercury Montego MX sitting in the breezeway beside his house.

But the rare car just serves as a window into his enthusiasm for all things auto-related.

A visit inside his house reveals a small study off his living room that is lined floor to ceiling with about 400 model cars.

They range from plastic models he made as a child to die cast cars he has purchased over the years. An entire section is devoted to cars related to movies or TV shows.

“I’ve always had the (car) bug, even as a child,” he said, adding that his first car had been a Plymouth Valiant that just sat in his backyard. “It never ran,” he said. “It never hit the road and I junked it.”

Since then he has owned a number of cars in addition to building his collection of model cars. He purchased his Mercury Montego five years ago and has done a fair amount of work to the engine over the years.

“At first glance, the car looked good,” he said of the hard top convertible with a black vinyl roof. “But when I got into it, I found it needed this and that. Technically, it needed a lot of work.”

He said the work included replacing the transmission, the carburetor, the radiator, the brakes and body mounts.

“There was a lot of play in the steering and it ran hot,” he said. “The carb was all gummed up.”

Ponte said he did much of the work himself, having graduated in auto mechanics from Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School in Fall River. He said he worked as a mechanic for a couple of years before joining Lightolier.

“Working on your car is one thing, working on someone else’s is another thing,” he said.

Ponte said he regularly attended car cruises, adding that the Montego was a good cruising car.

“It’s a cruising car not a racing car,” he said. “For a Sunday afternoon cruise, you can’t beat it. It runs like a dream.”

It also attracts attention, he said, partly because no one has ever seen one like it.

“Wherever she goes, she always turns heads,” he said. “(People have) never seen one like it.”

He said that in five years, he had only seen two other Montegos, a convertible that was “a basket case,” and a fastback.

Ponte has owned a number of cars over the years, including a 1962 Chevrolet Biscayne, a 1965 Plymouth Barracuda and a 1967 Pontiac GTO.

“I love old American muscle cars,” he said, adding his favorite was a 1966 Chevrolet Nova that he sold a few years ago.

“I regret selling that one,” he said, looking over a photograph of it. However, he said, someone offered him a good price and he and a friend had done so much work on it, “it was almost too hot to drive on the street.”

Inside the room he calls his toy room, Ponte pointed toward the section of model cars related to movies, all of which were neatly labeled. They included the 1968 Ford Mustang 390 CID Fastback that McQueen drove in the 1968 film Bullitt; the custom 1959 Cadillac ambulance from Ghostbusters (1984); and the complete collection of cars — yellow 1932 Ford Deuce Coupe, black 1955 Chevy Street Machine and white 1956 Ford Thunderbird — from American Grafitti (1973).

Some models were big, such as the yellow 1937 Cord convertible that required two hands to hold. Other, such as the three plastic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) model cars that he said were offered free with boxes of cereal, were very small and correspondingly less detailed.

Ponte also had a number of unmade model kits of cars related to TV shows on display, such as The Dukes of Hazzard, Scooby Doo and The Monkees. He also has a model of the Batmobile from the original TV 1960s series, the Batmobile from the 1997 movie Batman and Robin, and the Tumbler Batmobile from The Dark Knight (2008).

In addition to photographs of four cars he has owned over the years, his living room featured a poster of Rosie’s Diner (of the Rosie the Waitress Bounty paper towels ads) in Rockford, Mich., and a number of auto-themed objects, including four car telephones and a Jim Beam car bottle that has never been opened. Even a row of DVDs were car-related movies.

“Even my DVDs, cars, cars, cars,” he said. “I’m a car nut.”

Ponte, 56, is married to Marguerite and has worked at Lightolier, a lighting company based in Fall River, for 37 years. They have an 11-year old dog named Ranger that was sold to them as a Chihuahua. But he grew and grew right out of his Chihuahua skin.

“When we first got him, I could hold him in my hand like a teacup,” Ponte said. “But then he grew: half a pound, two pounds, five pounds, 10 pounds. I said, ‘Wait a minute, this is no Chihuahua.’ ”

He said the store told them they would have to return the dog to get their money back, but by then they were too attached to him.

“So here is Ranger, still with us today,” he said.

Ponte regularly attends car cruises, with Marguerite occasionally accompanying him. He said he is not interested in trophy shows.

“They are all nice people at cruise nights,” he said. “People just enjoying the sport, 18 to 80 (years old) talking at the same level.”

“And me and the Mercury are always there, like two peas in a pod.”

Auto Biography tells an interesting story about a car and its driver. If you think you have a newsworthy story to tell about your car, write to Auto Biography, Features Department, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St. Providence RI 02902 or e-mail projocars@projo.com. Be sure to put “Auto Biography” in the subject field.

The car doesn’t have to be a classic or expensive, but it should be somehow unique. The driver must be willing to be interviewed by a reporter about what makes this car special and to be photographed with the car.

pelsworth@projo.com