LEBANON — He could fix just about anything on a car, caught snakes as a hobby, kept them as family pets, loved drag racing and wrote computer programs while working at Dartmouth College.
Larry Carr lived a life of varied interests and passions, but at the top of that resume was something much more enduring, those who knew him say.
“Larry had a big heart,” said his friend Larry Brabant, a fellow car enthusiast who bought a Dodge Caravan from Carr. “He was well-loved by many. He touched a lot of hearts. I don’t think there is anyone in the Upper Valley who has a bad word to say about Larry. He was a great guy.”
Carr, who died Aug. 4, 2025, in Orlando, Fla., two months after suffering a stroke, earned a reputation for integrity and honesty selling cars.
Cars were his business, but were also a platform for Carr to help his community.
Carr’s son, Christopher, who lives in Florida, where his parents moved about eight years ago, said his dad took care of and helped a lot of people in the Upper Valley.
“He was a very honest person, very caring,” Christopher Carr said. “Just a really good man who always tried to do his best. He was the proverbial, give you the shirt-off-his-back kind of guy.”
Early adventures
Carr was born in Lebanon in 1949, the only child of Guila (Moodie) Carr Doucette and Charlie Paul Carr. His father owned a junkyard and that is where Carr likely discovered his passion for cars.
After his father died, Carr left school at the age of 16 to support his mother, who was deaf, said Audrey Carr, Carr’s wife. He began working different jobs, including a factory job in Claremont, where he sometimes put in back-to-back eight-hour shifts.
After his mother remarried, Carr left for California to live with his uncle in hopes of landing a job as mechanic in a dealership.
Carr could not afford the tools he needed and the California dealership refused to provide them, so he quit and got a job working in an exotic pet store that sold everything from alligators to monkeys, spiders and snakes, his wife, Audrey Carr said. Carr was put in charge of the snakes, which included pythons. The job didn’t last and when Carr left for home, he caught snakes on part of the trip back east and sold them, his wife said.
Animals continued to be a part of his life as he settled down and raised his family in the Upper Valley. He and Audrey married in 1982, after being introduced through her identical twin sister’s husband.
“We grew up around snakes,” said his daughter, Crystal Metric, a middle school music and chorus teacher in Hillsboro, N.H. “We had them as pets until Dad decided they had to be let go.”
Carr’s care for animals extended to other species. When two ferrets got loose from a dorm room at Dartmouth they were captured and brought to the Safety and Security Department where Carr worked, his daughter said. The ferrets, one of which had bitten someone, were going to be put down and tested for rabies until Carr stepped in.
“My dad said, ‘You can’t do that. These are ferrets. I will take them home and take full responsibility,’ ” Metric said. “He put them in a bucket and brought them home to his children.”
‘Cars that people could afford’
After his brief time in California, Carr returned to New Hampshire and sold cars at a local dealership for a few years before quitting to start Carr’s Cars and More Cars in Lebanon in 1981.
“He sold used cars only and they were late model, older cars that people could afford,” said Audrey Carr.
“He never wanted to give somebody a bad deal,” Brabant said. “I had seen him buy back cars from people even after he told them what the problem was with the car. If they came back to complain he would do what he could to make them happy.”
When his business closed in the early 1990s amid a steep recession in New England, Carr went to work in the Safety and Security at Dartmouth College as a dispatcher, but continued to buy cars at auctions and sell them from his home.
Another close friend, Ken Holbrook, who met Carr when they worked together at Dartmouth, said he remembers buying a car with 100,000 miles on it from Carr and discovering there was something wrong.
“I knew there would be something wrong with that many miles, but when Larry found out I got it fixed, he was so apologetic,” Holbrook said. “He was very conscientious about what he sold and never wanted to take advantage of anyone.”
Cars were his passion, especially the muscle cars of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Dodge Challenger, Dodge Charger and the Plymouth Road Runner, which were among MOPARS, short for Chrysler’s Motor Parts.
“He just loved the power in them,” Brabant said. “He really loved the 440 (cubic inch engine) Challenger. He probably owned more MOPARs than anyone in the Upper Valley. I’m a MOPAR guy too and we used to go to the MOPAR shows in Pennsylvania.”
Carr’s knowledge of autos was encyclopedic.
“He was known for his car knowledge and would always share it with anyone who was interested,” Audrey Carr said. “People were always stopping by to discuss cars. He was in car clubs and loved talking about what people did with the cars and the history of cars.”
Carr often struggled to understand how much he was respected and admired in the community and saw himself as “forgettable,” Metric said. But she knew differently.
“He couldn’t go anywhere without someone being excited to see him and talk about the car he sold them,” Metric said. “He may not remember their names, but he could always remember the car he sold.”
Even with failing eyesight, Carr continued buying and selling cars, enlisting the help of his friend, Holbrook, to help him choose cars and bring them home — one on a flatbed the other pulled from behind on a trailer.
“It was his personality,” Holbrook said of his friend. “We had a lot of the same likes and he had a great sense of humor. We had a lot of laughs together.”
‘Always for other people’
Carr, who drag raced for fun at New England Speedway in Epping, N.H., used his love and knowledge of cars to help the community with fundraisers. He organized an annual car show at the Leverone Field House at Dartmouth for three years in the mid-’90s, raising money for the Hanover Lions Club.
“When he did them they were big draws,” said Holbrook. “He brought in specialty cars from all over the place. When Larry stopped, it went downhill. It was like walking around a car lot and people did not want to pay to see cars they could look at for free.”
Carr also served his community in other ways, including as a member of the Jaycees, Lebanon Planning Board and Zoning Ordinance Review Committee, and Lebanon Historical Society.
He organized numerous car shows and haunted house fundraisers, donated to the children’s annex at the Lebanon Public Library and sponsored a ski team at Whaleback Mountain.
“It wasn’t anything for him,” Brabant said. “It was always for other people. The sad part is he didn’t know just how much people loved him.”
‘A better way to do things’
As comfortable and self-assured working on a computer as he was a carburetor, Carr became interested in computers in the early 1980s and a lot of what he learned was self-taught.
“He took some classes but never went to school for it,” Audrey Carr said.
Dartmouth eventually recognized his programming abilities and moved him from his dispatcher’s position to the IT department. He wrote a lot of programs, including one that improved the process for employees recording their hours, Holbrook said.
Carr understood early on what computers were capable of and he started programming because he wanted to figure out a better way to do things, Metric said.
“He did a music library program for my tuba music,” Metric said. “He made programs for everything.”
Carr retired from Dartmouth in 2012. Five years later, as Carr’s health declined — he had diabetes and AFib, short for atrial fibrillation, a rapid irregular heartbeat — and to escape the ice and snow, the Carrs moved to Florida.
In Florida, Carr continued living life to the fullest, riding a recumbent bicycle and working on, and riding, mobility scooters.
“One of the last videos we have of him was when he popped a wheelie on his mobility scooter,” Metric said, laughing as she recalled the scene.
A Celebration of Life/Memorial for Carr will be held Oct.19 at the Enfield Recreation Center from 2 to 5 p.m.
Patrick O’Grady can be reached at pogclmt@gmail.com
CORRECTION: Larry Brabant is a car enthusiast who bought a Dodge Caravan from Larry Carr, his friend. Brabant’s last name was misspelled in an earlier version of this story.