I wheeled the lawn mower out of the garage not long ago and realized, finally, that its long run was over. The wheels were tattered, some all but falling off. The frame had disintegrated to a point where sticks or pebbles could shoot out through the jagged gaps as nasty projectiles.
That did it. I’m a guy who actually lived out the scary warning so many of us heard from our folks about what can happen if you’re careless with a lawn mower: When I was maybe 11, I was playing catch with a baseball with my brother in the street, in the days when my family rented a place a block or two from a Dunkirk steel plant.
A teenager across the street was mowing his front lawn. He was zoned out, mind elsewhere. He mowed over a rock that launched toward me like a rocket, just as my brother threw the baseball. Honest to God, I saw them both in the air. Reflexively, I raised my glove and caught the ball.
Bad decision. The rock nailed me in the forehead. I bled all over the place and my brother drove me to the ER – as my siblings helpfully pointed out, my thick head offered ample protection – but I had my lifetime lesson.
Don’t screw around with the damage a lawn mower can do.
So I knew, a few weeks ago, that it was time to get another one. I pushed my old mower to the place of no return, over by our trash and recycling bins, and I went to Bob’s Ace Hardware in the Valley and bought a beautiful new machine.
At 66, it was the first brand-new mower I’ve ever owned in my life. Seriously. Because this is the deal:
I had no need for a new one for so many years, because of Dr. Mark.
Allow me to explain. After college, during a newspapering pilgrimage of more than a decade between multiple Upstate communities, my wife and I always lived in rented places with no worries about yard care. That was until the early 1990s, when we had two toddlers and rented an entire house in Syracuse — just before we bought the place we still have near Corcoran High School. I was mowing the grass for the first time since I was a teenager, when I handled both my family’s yard and a slew of neighborhood lawns to make some pocket money.
Mowing the lawn is still something I enjoy — the mindless rhythm, the scent of newly cut grass, the sense of a task visibly completed, crisp row after row. Yet I hadn’t needed a lawn mower for many years, and when that became a necessity in Syracuse, I think it was one of my brothers-in-law who gave me an old mower that lasted a few years.
Before long, that mower petered out. I needed another one, at a time when we didn’t have much dough. Driving around the city, I noticed this little throwback lawn mower shop on Grand Avenue, where the proprietor — who always seemed to wear suspenders — would be puttering around a row of used mowers that he kept outside, for sale.
This was Dr. Mark’s Small Engine Repair.
One day, in the early 2000s, I stopped in. There was an old green mower on sale for what I remember as $45. The machine was as simple as it gets, with zero bells or whistles. While a steady stream of characters wandered in and out, a guy who was clearly Dr. Mark came outside to greet me. He pulled the cord on the mower with one sharp tug. It fired up. That was good enough for me.
There was no need to even check the make or model. I paid him cash, loaded the mower in the back of our old minivan and drove it home.
For going on toward 25 years, I was golden with that mower.
I did my best to take care of it. I would bring it back to Dr. Mark for the occasional tune-up – the last price he charged me for a repair, $65, was still written in Sharpie on the mower the other day, when I pushed it to the curb. A day came when I drove along Grand Avenue and he was no longer there, which meant I needed to find another small engine guy.
But there was something timeless, a little precious, about that shop. I always wondered where he went, a question I finally felt the need to answer a few days ago.
Because that lawn mower was a marvel. Year after year, it did the job. I never forgot how Dr. Mark used to sit outside in a folding chair to chat both with his regulars and new customers. Whenever I went there, I had the same feeling I used to get at the nearby and now-closed-after-generations City Hardware:
You were part of something that you knew was fast disappearing.
This summer, more than 20 years after I bought the mower, I finally had to give it up. The exterior deck — the framing that protects you from the whirling blades — was cracked and falling to pieces. To use that old mower was simply dangerous. This week, I messaged a friend who deals in metal scrap, and he promised to stop by and pick it up.
All of it left me a little wistful. I had that mower for so long that it was the one our kids – now in their 30s – used when they first learned how to mow a lawn. Just before I pushed that old machine out to the street, I crouched down to take a good look at exactly what it was.
Using my phone, I checked the serial number online to nail down the year and make. I learned it was a Lawn Boy Silver Series walk-behind mower, made in 1999, meaning this machine was 27 years old.
Still, even in this recent spring and summer, it held together long enough for me to use it on the lawn a few more times — until, as it crumbled, it was simply too far gone.
That left me thinking: If I could manage it, I wanted to find the mysterious Dr. Mark and tell him how this mower he restored decades ago endured for so long.
But the chance for that conversation, I discovered, was lost two years ago.
His real name, it turns out, was Harold Mark Williams. Everyone called him Mark to distinguish him from his dad, who had the same first name — a detail I learned when his widow, Pam, responded to my message. She told me how she and Mark, early in 2024, drove to a doctor’s appointment after dropping off their son Mark and their granddaughters, Isabelle and Sophia.
Pam said her husband, at 71, suffered from multiple illnesses. He had told her, not long before that day, how he was simply feeling tired. After leaving the doctor’s, they settled into the car and pulled onto Buckley Road. Mark didn’t see an approaching vehicle. He was killed in the collision. Pam, knocked unconscious and critically injured, would eventually recover.
“I’m still here,” she told me quietly.
In love and grief, Pam was glad for the chance to tell her husband’s story. Mark “always wanted to be his own boss,” she said. For years, his day job was a paving operation he started with his dad. He also had a skillful touch with small engines, and he started the lawn mower repair for a little extra cash once their son was born in 1986.
Pam said Mark would have been delighted, but not surprised, at how long my mower lasted.
“He was one of those kinds of people,” she said of the way he handled repairs. “He saw it done once, and he knew how.”
Thus, the nickname: Dr. Mark, lawn mower physician.
Pam has particularly warm memories of the Grand Avenue shop, where his business was based for most of the 2000s. The atmosphere, she said, “was like its own little community over there.” There was a guy named Charlie who would hang around all day, and Pam’s late aunt, Bernadette Randall — the longtime chief dietician at Crouse Hospital — loved to stop in and spend hours shooting the breeze. A highlight of their week, Pam said, was buying takeout fish fries from the Westvale Fish Cove, not so far away.
“A lot of people would come in who were elderly, and some used to bring him cookies,” she said of the way customers responded to her husband. Pam said I was correct in my memory of his suspenders, which came with a story: Mark began using them when he weighed over 600 pounds, and they remained a part of his wardrobe even after he had gastric bypass surgery and ended up dropping almost 450 pounds.
Their romance began on the West Side. Mark grew up on Wyoming Street. Pam was from Fairmount. They met when Pam was working at the Syracuse Developmental Center — she spent her entire career working with people with developmental disabilities — and she would bring Mark a glass of cold water while he was doing a paving job, outdoors. She recalled how they were regulars at a Geddes Street tavern called Mike’s Keg, where Mark was a DJ and they knew everyone in the place.
After many years on Grand Avenue, Mark moved his repair business to Erie Boulevard. Even when he closed that place, he never really quit: Pam said Mark still had people stopping by with their lawn mowers after the couple retired to a home in Baldwinsville, near the Seneca River.
“That’s how he was,” Pam said. “A lot of times, for elderly customers, he didn’t charge. If he got a call at 3 a.m. from someone who needed help, he went. He had one elderly customer, he brought her lawn mower to her house, and then every single week for five years, he mowed her lawn.
“Everybody depended on him,” Pam said. “That’s how he lived his life.”
I thanked her, and promised I would make that point. When her husband died there was a small obituary online, a modest farewell for this guy who was always his own boss, but I’ll tell you this:
A few nights ago, I went outside to prepare that 27-year-old lawn mower for the curb, where my scrapper friend would find it the next morning. The frame, the whole exterior, was crumbling with age. On an impulse, I gave the starter cord for the engine one last tug.
It coughed and trembled, then it roared. That was the work of Dr. Mark.
