Syd Dunston was our family’s hero.

He died on Dec. 3 at the age of 88.

We met him 35 years ago when my husband and I had two young daughters and one old car.

Every day, I had to wait for my husband to get home from work before I could use the car to cover evening meetings for The Enterprise.

My kids got to take ballet lessons because we could walk to the corner in New Salem where Barbara Gallager, once a Rockette, taught dance — but so many other activities their friends did were out of reach.

I told myself they were happy playing in the old chicken coop we had turned into a playhouse, helping me bake or garden, or following their fantasies in the nearby woods.

Then we found Syd Dunston, and our world opened wide. Syd, with his daughter Diane, ran a junkyard just up the hill from our house.

Syd would find cars others had given up for lost and keep them running for us. He never crushed a car. He treated them as if they had souls.

Syd was an environmentalist ahead of his time, recycling car parts instead of junking them.

Diane ran the office and organized the yard, keeping a computerized record of every make and model, so that they could find the part you needed.

Syd had no interest in owning anything new, Diane Dunston said at her father’s funeral on Saturday; she spoke of a ten-dollar watch he’d accept for a fifty-dollar tow.

His granddaughter Abby spoke of how he’d pick up things people had discarded by the side of the road, thinking someone else may use them. He would help people, she said, “without judgment.”

We were among those people.

What we got at the Dunstons’ shop, though, was more than car repairs. We were uplifted. Good will permeated the place.

Syd, a wiry man, was quick both mentally and physically. He’d hop up from the pit after examining the underside of our car, and invite me down to take a look.

He never patronized me because I didn’t know the first thing about the mechanics of a car. Rather, he explained in simple terms what we were looking at and how he would fix it. He answered with patience the endless questions of my young daughters who often accompanied me on car-repair trips.

Diane, too, never looked down or judged. She served as a role model to my daughters — a picture of calm competence and caring in the midst of what was traditionally thought of as a male sphere.

Maggie, at 10, was thrilled when Syd invited her to ride with him in his old truck among the rows of vehicles in the junkyard. She cherishes that memory to this day.

Saranac liked exploring the stream that ran near the shop and Syd gave us permission to hold her birthday party there when she turned 8 so that she and her friends could go fossil hunting. They proudly brought home trilobites, brachiopods, and clams, the imprints of specimens that had been on Earth eons ago.

Syd himself seemed eternal to me. He kept working for decades after most men retire, and continued to work with what seemed like endless energy and eternal optimism.

His generosity was boundless. He helped not only my family but many new reporters at The Enterprise.

When I interviewed job candidates, the one question longtime publisher Jim Gardner would always ask was, “Do you have a reliable car?”

The aspiring reporters were young men and young women, usually just out of college, idealistically pursuing their first job in journalism as truth seekers. Many of them didn’t even have a car let alone a reliable one.

But we had Syd.

He more than filled the gap. When I called my friend Andrew Schotz the day Syd’s obituary came into our newspaper, Andrew said of course he’d come to the funeral. Andrew is now the editor of a daily newspaper in Maryland.

“He gave me my car, a Chevy Spectrum hatchback,” he recalled.

Andrew remembered how, when the car had needed repair and Andrew drove it up to Syd’s shop, Syd had jumped in and sped off for a test drive, returning with a quick diagnosis followed by an affordable fix.

The Spectrum was ultimately crumpled by a deer.

While the Enterprise reporters moved on to more lucrative jobs at bigger newspapers, and more expensive cars, the gratitude remains.

My daughters, too, continued to rely on Syd and Diane after they’d left home.

When Maggie, as a young woman driving the beloved Subaru wagon she’d inherited from her grandparents, was forced off the road on the way to her job in Boston — the driver who caused the accident never stopped — she called Syd.

And, although it was a Sunday and she was close to the Massachusetts border, he came right away with his trusty tow truck.

“He was very matter-of-fact,” Maggie recalled this week. “He said, ‘We’ll get it all patched up.’”

As always, Syd’s resoluteness steadied a shaken driver.

“This one is a pretty car,” Maggie recalled Syd saying. “You’re going to want it looking nice.”

And sure enough, Greg Giguere, Diane’s husband, did the body work so it looked better than new. “Greg even got the pin stripes on it,” said Maggie.

Long after I stopped needing near-constant car repairs, I would come to the shop when, say, I had a flat tire. I wrote this poem in 2016 after a tire repair and was thrilled when I saw it posted on the shop bulletin board:

Patching
 

Syd plucks a wing nut from my tire.

The tread it pierced had seemed so strong.

The tire was flat, my stamina, too;

I felt helpless, the world was wrong.
 

Greg hefts the tire upon his bench,

Frees it surely from the wheel,

Cuts a patch to mend the hole,

Applies the glue to set the seal.
 

Then, as we wait for glue to dry,

He asks me how my work is going.

Hard times for news, I say to him;

He listens so my words keep flowing.
 

“The only paper I read is yours.”

I feel as needed as a tire.

The patch is set; so is my fate.

My life rolls on, no longer dire.
 

It was my way of thanking Syd and Diane and Greg not for all the repairs and roadside rescues but for something more important — their ability to set things right. As skillfully as they used their hands, it is what they did with their hearts that mattered, patching up people as well as cars.