CANAAN — Thomas Marlar, everyone who knew and worked with him attest in awe, had a wondrous sense of the mechanical, the kind of guy who could find the glitch in a broken piece of machinery that had stumped everyone else and flawlessly repair it.
“We bought a used mowing tractor and it wouldn’t move,” recalled Bob Scott, who runs the highway department for the town of Canaan, where Marlar’s job as town mechanic was to keep all the equipment running smoothly.
“The prior mechanic threw all sorts of parts at it and it didn’t work. We had the expert in from the equipment dealer and he said it was an electrical problem,” Scott relates.
“Then Tom came here and went through all the electricals and said everything was fine. He said the problem was the clutch cable. And it’s been a great machine ever since,” Scott said.
There are many such stories around Canaan like that about Marlar, who suffered a massive heart attack on August 14 and died at 57 in front of the town’s ambulance bays where he had been rushed by friends after collapsing at home. He was the only one in his large family that stayed in the Upper Valley.
In a tribute on Canaan’s town website, Town Administrator Mike Samson wrote that “it is the consensus of the town selectman that Tom was the best mechanic that had served the town in the last 15 years,” marveling how Marlar “was able to fix anything mechanical in the town” and that during his three years as town mechanic he saved taxpayers $95,000 “by completing repairs that previously had been sent to third-party repair services.”
“Tom absolutely believed that was his duty,” Samson wrote in the tribute, which was accompanied by a photograph of Marlar in his work shirt, standing with a satisfied grin in the garage of the highway department.
“He was probably as well-liked as anyone could be in the town of Canaan,” Samson said in an interview.
Marlar grew up in a house on School Street in Lebanon, the fourth of seven children of Thomas Marlar, who worked at Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory and died in 2002, and Marilyn Marlar, a nurse who worked at Dartmouth-Hitchcock and passed away at 85 in Texas in June.
A champion ski jumper at Lebanon High School where he won several trophies, Marlar went to Florida after graduating and tried his hand at carpentry for a spell, said his older sister, Theresa Canale, of Marlborough, Mass.
In 1988 Marlar enlisted in the Marines, where he was trained as a diesel mechanic, which set him on his life’s course.
“After Tom got out of high school, he went down to Florida. I think he was floundering a little and looking for something to help ground him and the military did that,” Canale said.
During his stint in the Marines he served in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. Photographs from the war, which friends say he didn’t like talking about much, show a smiling, thick-neck Marine in camouflage behind the wheel in the cab of a five-ton M939 cargo truck.
His first week back home from deployment in 1991, Marlar met Victoria Wallace, of Canaan, through friends at 5 Olde Nugget Alley in Hanover, the basement tavern now occupied by Tuk Tuk Thai Cuisine. They were married in 1994, had a son together — Thomas Jr., now 26, who works as technician in pathology at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center — but remained on friendly terms following their divorce in 2001.
“He was hot,” explained Victoria Marlar, who kept her former husband’s name about her first impression of the strapping ex-Marine and veteran who caught her eye at the bar.
A year after they were married Marlar went to work as a mechanic for RSD Leasing in White River Junction, where he stayed for 22 years and impressed coworkers with his work ethic and skill in all facets of mechanical repair.
“Because he came from the military he had an S.O.P (standard operating procedure) way of doing everything,” said John Edwards, who worked with Marlar on the 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. shift in the repair facility of the company. “His theory was if you do the job the same way every time you eliminate mistakes.”
Edwards said Marlar’s by-the-book attitude could come off to some as hard and inflexible but, owing to his responsibility in overseeing maintenance for a fleet of 400 school buses that RSD leased to school districts in Vermont and New Hampshire, Marlar approached his job with seriousness.
“His meticulous attention to detail was because he knew he was responsible for the safety of school children,” Edwards said.
In 2017, Marlar went to work for the town of Canaan. mostly, Victoria Marlar said, because he was growing tired of the commute between his home in Canaan and White River Junction, especially during the freezing, dead-black winter nights after his shift. His new job at the Canaan highway department was a short drive from his house on Moss Road.
“It wasn’t even five minutes down the road,” Victoria Marlar said, who said her former husband “could fix anything. The washer was broken, he fixed it. The refrigerator was broken, he fixed it. We never had a repairman over.”
Marlar’s mechanical skills displayed themselves in other ways, too. He had a long-standing hobby designing and building his own firearms and ammo and in his garage was parked a Revolution Mini-500 helicopter — he actually bought two, the second to harvest for parts — on which he had fashioned a “jet engine,” according to friends.
“He got it three inches off the ground and never did it again,” Scott said.
Lean and outwardly fit, Marlar nonetheless had severe health problems, much of which was attributable to his smoking habit. Despite two prior heart attacks, he loathed doctors and hospitals and stubbornly refused to take his medication, friends and coworkers said.
“He called it rat poison,” said John Coffey, operator of Canaan’s sewer and water system.
Although the relationship between Marlar and his son, Thomas Jr., had been distant in recent years, last year they “reconnected” and had seen more of each other, Thomas Jr. said.
“One of the last things he did was he spent almost a full month working on my car. He had access to the town garage and would work on it on the weekends. He replaced the side panels and it was damn near perfect when it was done .. he was a perfectionist. It had to be exactly right.”
Marlar’s perfectionism was shared by another openly discussed characteristic: his belief that society was heading toward cataclysm and it was necessary to prepare for a time of violent upheaval. Friends emphasize that they never witnessed any signs that Marlar himself was prone to violence and was even willing to be ribbed by colleagues over the “prepper” videos he watched on YouTube.
Marlar’s willingness to openly share his beliefs, however, could be a turn-off for some.
“I can say most of my sales reps stopped coming here because they had to listen to him. He would have all these political views and they didn’t want to listen to that,” said Scott, who said Marlar believed “that the government was coming to get us and he was ready for them.”
Samson, Canaan’s town administrator, said it would be unfair to paint Marlar as an off-the-grid recluse.
“Did he feel like society was headed down the wrong path? Yes. Did he feel in being prepared for that possibility? Yes. Having said that, he wasn’t dropping out of society at all.”
On the contrary, Samson said that Marlar “had a real understanding of human nature. He understood all the people he was working with very well and was a great judge of character.”
Samson recalled a conversation he had with Marlar only a few months ago about religion “and he launched into a presentation of what God is and what God’s role is which was equal to any course in theology” in college.
“Tom had a pretty clear vision of the divine forces in the universe,” Samson said, calling the ace town mechanic “everything you’d want to see in a self-actualized person, and it comes out of the blue.”
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
