CLAREMONT — Lennie Veilleux’s father was a longtime youth baseball coach, and he looked forward to his boy taking up the national pastime.

But it was not to be. From an early age, Lennie had eyes only for cars.

“His dad really wanted his son to be into sports,” Beverly Duval, Veilleux’s sister, said in a phone interview.

Instead of going to practices, Veilleux would head a couple of houses up Clark Street, off Claremont’s Maple Avenue, to the garage of his neighbor, Ernie Bodreau, who at six years older than Veilleux was already working on his own racecar. From the age of 10 or 11, when youth sports tend to get serious, Veilleux was learning from his teenage friend how to work on cars.

If sports are an ancient arena of masculine competition and camaraderie, cars are something more novel, accepting and collaborative. A willingness to work and learn and a modicum of skill are all that’s required.

Born in 1950, Leonard Veilleux spent his life among cars, as a mechanic and service manager, most notably for 30 years at Dean Hill Motors, a Saab dealership on the Charlestown Road. As an enthusiast, he owned many cars and motorcycles over the years and helped racing drivers build their machines.

Veilleux died Dec. 4, 2024 in a recliner in his Claremont home. His death certificate gave the cause as atherosclerotic hypertension, Duval said. He was 74.

He and Beverly, who is two years his junior, were adopted through Catholic Charities. Studies of adoption have found that it can be a trial, but that wasn’t how the Veilleux children experienced it.

“My parents, they wanted us,” Duval said. “We had the best upbringing you could ever have. ... My brother and I knew what it meant to be loved.”

Ernest Veilleux worked for B&M Railroad, and his wife, Marie, kept house and worked at a laundry and as a seamstress. They paid to send their children to St. Mary Elementary and High schools in Claremont. After graduation, Lennie studied to be a machinist at New Hampshire Community Technical College.

As an infant, Lennie had been small and sickly, Duval said, but he grew into a healthy boy. He and his friend Peter Fennessy would build plastic car models, paint them to look like cars that raced at what was then called Claremont Speedway, and sell them at the races.

When Veilleux started working on Ernie Bodreau’s racecar, a heavily modified 1934 Chevy three-window coupe, racing was having a heyday at small tracks in Claremont and other places around New England. Veilleux became part of a long line of skilled mechanics in Claremont; some of them raced and some stayed behind the scenes. Just about every filling station fielded a team and driveways and garages around the city had racecars in them, Bodreau said.

Bodreau grew up going to races with car owner Frank “Stroker” Smith, whose No. 311 car was driven at the time by Sonny Rabideau. When he started racing, Bodreau’s car wore No. 211 as an homage. He raced for around 30 years.

At the time, racing was an inexpensive pursuit that valued know-how and creativity over money, Bodreau said. Racers would work on their cars to increase horsepower, improve handling and reduce weight. It was hands-on learning, no classroom required.

Veilleux “learned a lot at my garage,” Bodreau said of his young student.

Veilleux took what he learned from Bodreau and built on it. He worked in the parts department at Howe Motors Chevrolet and retained a lifelong soft spot for Chevy cars, particularly Corvettes, of which he owned several. He moved on to work as a mechanic at the Sunoco on Washington Street.

It was from there that Raymond Lemieux, one of the founders of Dean Hill, who was also Veilleux’s next-door neighbor, poached him, in January 1976.

“At the time,” Veilleux said in a 2006 interview with the Valley News, “he had like two mechanics, no inventory system, they just had parts in a box, just a mess, no proper billing strategies, no inventory. ... So I got done working at the gas station and went to work for him.”

To an outsider, this situation might have seemed odd, for a number of reasons. Veilleux, who grew up working on American iron, was now in charge of servicing upper-crusty Swedish cars. He was also only 26 years old and could be a bit of a wildman.

Scott Krueger went to work for Veilleux at Dean Hill in 1985, when he was still a student at Stevens High School. At one point, a friend of Veilleux’s hired him to change tires at the racetrack on weekends. There was talk of a guy who rode his motorcycle, naked, around the track.

“Lenny goes, ‘Yep, that was me,’” Krueger said in a phone interview.

Working on Saabs didn’t seem odd to Veilleux, who saw cars from a practical point of view. He “just loved cars,” said Krueger, who has owned and operated Krueger Autosport in Plainfield for the past 20 years. “It was the language he spoke.”

By the time Kreuger started working at Dean Hill, the shop was a well-oiled machine. Krueger received a slightly more formal version of the initiation into the automotive world that Veilleux had gotten from Ernie Bodreau. Starting at $4 an hour, he was given a shop bay of his own and put to work doing oil changes, rebuilding brake calipers, and making sure the shop’s loaner fleet was in good running shape.

“I was working on cars right off the bat,” Krueger said. Veilleux extended respect to Krueger and told him that all he had to do was maintain it.

Saab was never a big carmaker, but it was in its prime in the 1980s. Dealers kept all the parts necessary to build the cars on the shelf, and Dean Hill also rebuilt parts to keep on hand for customers who didn’t have as much money as the doctors, bankers, lawyers and equestrians who were the core of the Saab clientele.

This meant Dean Hill had a broad customer base at a variety of income levels.

Before opening his own business, Krueger worked at other dealerships; none of them was as smoothly run as Dean Hill, he said.

After changing hands, Dean Hill went out of business in 2006, and Saab stopped making cars in 2011. (There’s still a Dean Hill Saab Service, though, run by Roland St. Sauveur, a scion of one of the original company’s founders, in Charlestown.) Veilleux was there to the end.

At work, Veilleux was exacting, and at times mercurial. “He was very fair, but cantankerous,” Krueger said.

Veilleux was married once, but it was short-lived. He vowed never to marry again and stuck to it, though he and Genevieve Johnston were partners for 30 years, until her death in 2022.

For much of that time, Veilleux and his sister weren’t close, but grew closer over the past few years, Duval said. He had kept a camp on Lake Winnisquam in Laconia for decades, and Duval would visit with him there until he sold it last summer, and they were in contact right up until his passing.

Duval had always thought her brother was a bit gruff, but in his retirement, she saw a sweeter side of him. “He was the kindest man, and always had the nicest things to say to everyone,” Duval said.

Much of his life was devoted to the family that accumulates around cars. Duval worked as a medical secretary and when doctors found out who her brother was they were in a kind of awe that she was related to the man who kept their cars in perfect shape.

There are still mechanics and racecars, but the era that sparked Veilleux’s interest might be over, said Krueger, who at 54 is 20 years younger than his mentor. When Krueger started, Claremont was at the tail end of its life as a factory town and still full of people with mechanical chops. The shift to computers and a service economy was underway.

That didn’t work for Veilleux or for Krueger, who has a young guy working in his shop with him right now.

“If he ever leaves, he’s going to leave with a book of knowledge in his head. He’s going to say, ‘Scott Krueger taught me that, and Lennie Veilleux taught him,’” Krueger said.

The tradition carries on.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.

CORRECTION: Leonard Veilleux was a sickly infant who grew into a healthy boy. Veilleux’s health was described inaccurately in a previous version of this story.