MISQUAH — Gordon “Gordy” Lindstrom, 86, of Misquah, died Wednesday at Lakeside Memorial with his family near. He was born in 1939 in the farmhouse on County 9 that his grandfather built, and he lived his whole life within sight of the water.

Gordy ran Lindstrom’s Service on Main Street from 1968 until he sold it in 2003, and in those thirty-five years he kept a good share of the Chain’s outboards, snowblowers, and stubborn farm trucks running. He could fix nearly anything with points and a condenser and declined, on principle, to learn fuel injection, a stance he maintained cheerfully to the end. He was a fifty-year member of the Legion, a fixture of the ice-fishing contest, and a soft touch for any kid who pushed a broken minibike into his bay.

The shop itself was its own institution: the pegboard where every tool had a painted outline it mostly obeyed, the coffee can labeled MIGHT NEED that outlived three mowers’ worth of donor parts, the bay door that stood open from thaw to freeze so a man could push a dead machine in without the ceremony of asking first. It is the reason the classifieds of this paper still carry, most weeks, a free mower or a kicker motor offered “in memory of Gordy” — a custom that began at his retirement and that nobody has seen any cause to end.

He is survived by Arlene, his wife of sixty-one years; their three children; eleven grandchildren; and a great-grandchild born in May, whom he got to hold. He was preceded in death by his brother Vern and his fishing partner of forty years, Rusty Berg.

He and Rusty Berg fished together for forty years off the same gravel bar, in the same two seats, holding between them exactly one unresolved argument — jig versus lindy rig — which both men prosecuted every Saturday and neither ever won. Rusty went last spring; the family takes some comfort that the argument can now resume.

Services are Saturday at First Lutheran, the Rev. Karl Lindholm officiating, with burial at Lakeview and lunch by the Ladies’ Aid to follow. Memorials are preferred to the pavilion roof fund, “so the thing finally gets done,” which the family notes Gordy said about it for fourteen years.