Leon Taylor’s home in Weare has seen decades of family celebrations. On Sunday, Taylor expected to revisit the familiar rituals of those previous occasions — dinner, cake, ice cream and pleasant conversation — when his children brought him into his front yard.

There, a car parade organized in his honor was gusting past his home along North Stark Highway, where Taylor is known to wave to passing cars each morning. The day’s electrifying energy, saturated with the call-and-response chorus of car horns and his family’s cheers, owed to an unrivaled milestone: Taylor’s 100th birthday.

“I wheeled him to the end of the driveway and I said ‘this is all for you’,” recalled Taylor’s daughter, Amy Shannon. “He said ‘I’ve never felt better. I think we should do this every day.’”

Taylor has been many things to his community in Weare. By all accounts, he’s been a hero.

At age 14, Taylor joined the Weare Fire Department as a junior volunteer firefighter. At the time, equipment was scant. Shannon remembers from her father’s accounts that the department owned only one station wagon. She also remembers that, what the department lacked in infrastructure, her father made up for with his ingenuity and dedication.

“He had almost this sixth sense. He would sit in his chair with the fire radio resting on his chest because he knew something was coming. He already had his boots on by the time the phone rang,” she said.

Taylor fought house fires in surrounding towns and forest fires in the White Mountains, finally stepping down after 75 years of service, a staggering career that earned a special commendation from former Gov. Maggie Hassan. His professional career flourished in another sector, though. For decades, Taylor worked at Noxland Equipment, where he installed the first milking parlor farms in New England. He continued working restlessly until well into his 90s, fixing Massey Ferguson tractors for local farmers.

Taylor contracted the Polio virus when he was still an infant. Today, he is in a wheelchair, but for the majority of his life, his almost imperceptible limp did not deter him from helping his neighbors or embarking on ambitious pet projects. He was a Fish and Game Warden and a Forestry Warden. For five decades, he flew a piper cub plane, landing often on Lake Horace and stepping out to check children for life vests.

“He was always a caretaker in the town, always helping people with their plumbing or their electrical issues. If someone in town needed something, he took care of it,” Shannon said. “He had yankee ingenuity.”

Leon Taylor and his family, now consisting of eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, built an unmissable presence in Weare. In Weare schools, Karen Williams met Tayor’s sons and, through them, she met Taylor. Years later, she would be the one to mobilize their community to honor Taylor on his 100th birthday.

It all happened at warp speed: Early the previous week, Williams saw a Facebook post from Shannon asking neighbors to share their birthday wishes by sending cards. Taylor’s health is fragile, and since the pandemic, the family has been taking rigorous precautions to safeguard his well-being.

The request set Williams’ wheels spinning. During the pandemic, while she was living in Colorado, Williams watched her brother plan a truck drive-by as a fundraiser for a cousin facing medical and financial hardships. Later, Williams’ brother himself sustained a head injury from a fall, and she put together a fundraising truck rally for him.

“I just watched what it did for my cousin and my brother and how they responded. It helped them mentally, not only financially but mentally. I saw the response to these types of events and I thought ‘you know, turning 100 is special. If we can all get together, it’ll be a great feel-good moment,’” she said.

That thought sparked a flurry of activity. Williams called Weare’s fire and police departments, phoned neighboring departments and recruited community members. At noon on Sunday, around 40 cars met at Weare Middle School and the procession began.

Williams was the only non-family member to join the Taylor family at their house before the parade. She said the choice to honor Taylor with such an exuberant show of support from his community was obvious.

“The town has lost so many of our long-term folks. A lot of the, for the lack of a better word, ‘old-timers’ aren’t with us anymore.” Williams said. “So, the ones that we have that have been so dedicated to serving our town and our people, I think it’s worth a little effort to celebrate them when we have the opportunity.”

Rebeca Pereira can be reached at rpereira@cmonitor.com