Whitefish Portrait: Meet neighborhood mechanic Roger Fingar

Roger Fingar has been turning wrenches for as long as he can remember.

“It’s a family thing,” Fingar said at his auto shop inconspicuously tucked into the middle of the City Beach neighborhood on Skyles Place. “My father was a shade tree mechanic. When we were kids we used to help him out.”

By the time Fingar was in high school he was serious about learning the trade and started taking classes. His first “real” job was as a mechanic at a Toyota dealership in San Diego. He then worked for eight years as a California smog technician.

In 1993, he took a trip with his family to Whitefish to visit his brother-in-law. He enjoyed the area so much he decided then it was time to leave behind the fast pace of the big city. Later that year, he and his wife, Kathy, and their three children moved to Montana.

“I loved it up here,” Fingar said. “Less traffic, less people.”

The family lived for about three months at the Motel 6 in Kalispell before finding work and moving into a home in Whitefish.

Fingar landed a job at the former Prestige auto shop in Kalispell where he worked for six years. He later worked at Midway Motors before taking ownership of Can Am Motors in 2005 at his current location on Skyles Place.

He enjoys working in the quiet neighborhood setting, but says the shop might be a little too far off the beaten path.

“There are still a lot of people that don’t know we’re here,” he said.

Most of his work comes from referrals and repeat customers that consider Fingar a trustworthy neighborhood mechanic.

“I’ve been working for some people for years,” he said.

Being a mechanic is more than turning wrenches, he said.

“You have to be a people person,” he said. “You have to play detective to find the problem.”

Fingar will work on nearly any model of car or truck — new or old — but he mostly sees Subarus and Toyotas from his Whitefish clients.

The business has changed a lot since he started out.

“We didn’t have the electronics back in the early 80s,” he explained “So I went back to school so I could learn computers.”

His entire career has been a learning process, he said.

“I say I’ve been to the school of hard knocks,” he said. “We’re in school every day. Sometimes it can be a struggle, but I learn something new every day.”

All three of Fingar’s children, Roger, Jolene and Danielle, graduated from Whitefish High School. Roger is following in his father’s footsteps and works at an auto body shop in Denver.

Fingar met Kathy in San Diego when they were teenagers. They have been married for 39 years.

Fingar says he’s considered changing careers, but continues on with the trade he loves.

“I just like doing it,” he said. “I’ve thought about doing other things, but I just like working on cars.”