NASHUA – Some business owners might cringe a bit when they hear how Marty McLaughlin starts a typical day at the office: Reviewing the latest batch of customer-satisfaction surveys.

But McLaughlin, the third-generation owner of enduring residential and corporate moving firm McLaughlin Transportation Systems, has long made it his business to make sure customers’ responses get his day off to a pleasant start.

Doing everything in its power to please often-anxious clients – moving is the second most stressful life event, behind death and ahead of divorce, McLaughlin said – is far more than a slogan at the Nashua-based firm, which just turned 75 years old.

The state’s sole Mayflower agent couldn’t be any more local: It was founded in Nashua by a Nashua native, and has been headquartered in Nashua ever since.

“It’s pretty simple. We give a great move for a very competitive price,” McLaughlin said last week in his second-floor office at 20 Progress Ave., the firm’s home since his father, the late John H. McLaughlin, bought the building from Gerald Nash and Sam Tamposi in 1965.

While the business has evolved, and occasionally shifted gears, since telephone lineman John W. McLaughlin bought Robert Morrell’s tiny moving business in pre-World War II Nashua, transferring the entire contents of apartments, condos, little homes, mansions, schools and businesses has remained its staple.

“We’ve moved some families five, six, seven times,” McLaughlin said. His drivers shuttled the belongings of the late Sen. Warren Rudman, former governor and U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg, former congressman Charlie Bass and a few other politicians from New Hampshire to Washington, D.C., and back.

As has society, the moving business has worn many different faces in the past three quarters of a century.

“It used to be Florida, or Scottsdale or Phoenix all the time,” he said of the numerous retirees the company moved to warmer climates as McLaughlin was growing up. “People aren’t doing that much anymore. I think because they’re afraid. They hear about all the storms nowadays and worry they’re too frail to deal with it.”

Similarly, there was a “California trend,” when moves to the left coast were common, McLaughlin recalled. But that trend fizzled as well: earthquakes.

“Until the early ’90s, one-third of our moves were retirees,” he said. “Now, I’d have to say, I’m not really sure what the future will bring for the moving business.”

Moves have dropped a bit since the economy went south, McLaughlin said, but things are picking up a little at a time.

“We’ve seen an incremental increase of people moving into new homes, which has always been a great thing to see. For those buying their first house, it’s all smiles. It’s new, and it’s all theirs now,” he said.

But like any profession, the moving business isn’t always peaches and cream. McLaughlin said the company pays particular attention to one category of clients in particular. “We meet a lot of people who aren’t happy about moving at all,” he said. “Mostly, the reason is a new job … we try to do a little extra, make the experience the best it can be.”

Tracing the firm’s – and thereby, the family’s – roots is quite an interesting venture. It begins with Michael McLaughlin, a “very stern, very strong man with a mustache,” according to a brief family biography written by his son, John W. McLaughlin – Marty McLaughlin’s grandfather.

In 1905, Michael McLaughlin, a Crown Hill resident and wholesale grocer, was seriously injured while unloading beer kegs from a rail car. Incapacitated and in great pain, he suffered for a year before succumbing, wrote his son, who was 6 at the time.

He began helping his widowed mother, who took in laundry to try to pay the bills. He wrote about taking an after-school job at Proctor Brothers, handing over his pay envelope – unopened – to his mother for years.

A first-class telephone lineman at age 18, John W. McLaughlin suffered multiple injuries the next year when he fell off a building in the city’s Millyard. Hovering near death, he was gradually nursed back to health by doctors, along with his mother, whose prayers and strength, he wrote, “proved a great help to me in my recovery.”

In 1925, McLaughlin wrote, he met and married Alice Martin, whose family was connected to the moving business. Admitting a lifelong interest in the profession, McLaughlin took action when he learned Robert Morrill wanted to sell.

Left with three “worn out” trucks, a tiny office and heavy-drinking employees, he wrote, McLaughlin nevertheless held on, praising his wife for her support. Then came a two-pronged break that set the original McLaughlin moving company on its path to success.

Nashua had just completed a brand-new high school on Elm Street, and all the contents of the old school on Spring Street had to be moved. Ditto the next year with Nashua City Hall, which opened at 229 Main St.

The business grew quite healthy, McLaughlin wrote. During World War II, he built a building to store furs, hence giving the company its longtime former name McLaughlin Moving and Storage Co.

A bigger fur “vault” and rug vault followed. John H. McLaughlin, called into service at age 18, returned home and went to work for his father. Upon the elder McLaughlin’s premature death in 1952, his son, just 26 at the time, found himself at the helm of a prospering business.

Politically active, John H. McLaughlin was a two-term state senator who “got the fire bug,” his son said with a laugh, and became a city fire commissioner, a gig that lasted more than 30 years.

In the mid-’70s, Marty McLaughlin, a student at Nathaniel Hawthorne College in Rindge, bought his own moving firm, the former M.J. Whalen of Portsmouth. “Pease was rocking and rolling at the time,” he said. “We had more business than we knew what to do with.”

After several years, McLaughlin returned to Nashua to work for his father, but kept his Seacoast company. In the mid-’80s, as John McLaughlin looked toward retirement, he handed the company reins to his son.

Today, McLaughlin presides over one of the nation’s top five international moving firms. And he keeps up on his reading: “Yep, still read ’em every morning,” he said of his customer surveys, flashing a grin.

Dean Shalhoup can be reached at 594-6443 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com. Also, follow Shalhoup on Twitter (@Telegraph_DeanS).