Marlin's Auto Center opened in 1992. By then Marlin had been learning machines for a while: the electrical trade from his father in the 1950s, engines through the 60s, and a stretch keeping a furniture plant running up in Red Lion before he decided to work for himself.
The shop started small, as a body shop. A few years in, it moved into the building on Main Street where it still sits today, and the work expanded: mechanical repair, then PA State Inspections, eventually all the things you'd want from a full-service shop. Body work, somewhere along the way, fell off the list. There's only so much one shop can do well, and we'd rather do six things right than ten things halfway. Today we run with four full-time mechanics.
There are a lot of ways to run a family-owned auto shop. We chose the slow one. We tell the customer what their car actually needs, don't make up stuff about the things it doesn't. We're lucky enough to be busy enough. No sense or pride in lying to people to hit a quota. We want to do the job right the first time so it doesn't need to come back until it's time to come back. We're not the cheapest in town because the cheapest in town rarely ends up that way, so we charge a fair price. Three decades of that, and most of our customers are people whose parents brought their first car here, and whose kids now bring theirs.
Thirty-some years in the same building, with the same phone number, and the same way of doing things. And for the most part, thirty-some years with the same guys, just with a few more miles on us, too.