What are some of your best memories roofing with your dad or just learning in the early years?

One of mine is getting woke up at 4:30 to see dad at his desk figuring business. This was after staying out til 2:00, playin pool and drinkin just a bit. :unsure: I would say "aren't you tired?" he would say, "get up, you gotta work, you shouldn't drink if you can't get up to work." Man those were the days.

Bumping this in honor of the day.

Glad I got to see my dad yesterday.

Must be nice, I never had a Dad around to share roofing adventures with. :(

Oh yeah Dad was only 68 when he passed.

Thanks for sharing everyone. DEATH SUCKS...Only for us that are left ...I think. Because we miss our loved ones so much. Anyway,,my Dad past away from cancer in 2008. He had lost a leg from below the knee a few years earlier from a blood disease. He still drove(it was his right leg) talk about scary driving :huh:. He also climbed the ladder and did estimates until a year later when he lost his other leg, above the knee. After that he was tired and stayed in his wheelchair. I had finally convinced him to get out of the house. He said he was going with me the next day to the "kaboom" fest at the bay. We were going to take a fast ride in my 1980 z-28. He loved to drive fast. Well I got a call that night that he had a seizure and was in the hospital. Cancer spread to his brain. I got to hospital and they had him strapped to the bed!! He would pull all of his tubes out of his nose and throat, so they strapped him down. He told meto talk them into letting him free, I did. He promised he wouldn't pull them out, he did :unsure:. He slowly faded. I couldn't talk to him the last month. He just looked at me. I gave him some water on a sponge, to moisten his lips and give him a drink. He bit it hard and looked at me as to say, take care of yourself and don't take any shit. Or I've had it this shit hurts I'm leavin now. Not sure. He passed away about fifteen minutes later.

I've seen my Dad work so damn hard over the years that I think it gave me the never give up complex. Not just at work, but re-building trucks overnight so he can go to work the next morning. He had the whole crew quit on him one time, went to work by himself. They came back.

He also had a heart attack on his 39th birthday while on a tearoff. It was during the time he was running two crews. 17 men total. If he had done a few things smarter with the business, rather than just running in overdrive, he might not have had the heart issues so early.

Luckily, about six years ago, he had a quadruple bypass that has held tight. It hasn't left my mind since he was 39. At sixty, I'm still trying to get him to slow down, just a little bit.

"... San Fran has a lot of hills in the downtown area....

Was going up Divisadero from Lombard one day and when I got to the top, there was a semi coming from the other direction, high centered on his frame. Must not have gotten good instructions from somebody in the office or else he figured wrongly he was better off striking out across town on his own. Strangest thing I've seen on those hills. Imagine what was going through his mind as he climbed higher and higher from block to block and then took off into thin air for a second or two with zero visibility before everything "ground" to a halt and left him hanging there unable to go forward or back. Talk about a beached whale.

Thanks for sharing that. For my dad it was a brain tumor. He hobbled on for another twenty years with a new operation about every three years and none of us ever really get over it completely. I carry him with me every day.

Great post. Been so long that a lot of memories have faded into the mists. My Dad started roofing with his cousin on weekends to supplement his truck driving job. I was probably about 12. Used to tag along, do cleanup and carry up partial bundles. Mid 1960's. Over the years I learned a lot about hard work and became a good shingler by the time I was 16. The things I remember most are working in some damned cold weather. I couldn't take it when it got below freezing but I remember him doing a wood shake job when it was -20F. He was a hard worker and very honest. Unfortunatley he never learned the business end of the business and was working for wages. He did work for a few builders that took full advantage of that. I used to get so mad with him for putting up with their crap. He eventually got so much work going that he quit the trucking job and did full time roofing. Sometimes had 6 jobs going at the same time trying to keep everybody happy but not getting any of them done. Really got to know him as a good man over the years but had a hard time working for him. At 20 a friend and I started our own "company" which didn't pan out of course and I was doing work for another contractor for a little while untill one afternoon when my friends mother showed up at the job to take me home but wouldn't tell me why. He woke up that morning with a headache and went back to bed. Aneurism, age 42. Worst shock of my life and one I couldn't even talk about for 10 years. Even 40 years later it brings tears to my eyes. A real tragedy. Looking back I can see how with the right business training he could have had a great business and lived a good life but then again that weak blood vessel probably would have taken him any way. One lesson for any of you younger guys starting out. Make sure you get life insurance to protect your family if you were to suddenly be gone. There's a lot more to this story than I will get into but I thought I would tell my story.

Thanks Dad for all you did for me.

I remember when I had to get under the dump truck at the transfer station and pull the hoist lever 'cuz the cable was broke and it was fully loaded.

I PRAISE JESUS I survived that risky maneuver..... :S

Okay before I go back to digging here is one. I had never driven a stick shift before. My dad said get in the 1967 ford f600 and drive to the job. I got in grinded some gears and was on my way to the job. After a few weeks the trucks brakes went out on me as I was rollin through downtown Frisco, Yee Ha! He said drive it to the yard so we can work on it. Whew, talk about pressure and scary. San Fran has a lot of hills in the downtown area. I rolled through a few red lights because the emergency brake and downshifting was not holding my full load of T and G tear off. God was definitely watchin over me that day. This was all at rush hour!! What a ride that was. Dad always taught me to get it done no matter how impossible it seems. My men think I am a little crazy, probably because I am. I can see some of it rubbing off on them :)

Man these stories are great, I sure miss my Dad. Keep em comin. I'm still lovin the memories and these stories kick up a lot of emotion, sniff and blow. Alright back to digging my garden, I am late this year, should have planted last month.

My dad wasn't big on the manual labor arts. When I was in junior high school he decided we needed to reroof the 8/12 horse barn because the 90# was crumbling. Bought a bunch of solid green at the lumber yard back in the day when a little can of lap cement was inserted into each roll. According to the instructions, this had to be heated to make it runny. We did have a rickety wooden ladder to get me up there. Nailed little tin can lids down over the knotholes after tear off. I tied a rope around my waist and ran it over the ridge to the ground where he held it. I don't use that method anymore. We did have a bonding experience around the same time when we used a two-man saw to cut up a bunch of fallen trees. It would be interesting to know what all was going through his mind during the hours he stood on the ground holding the rope. I'm pretty good at working sedoku puzzles, but I really can't get too far with this one. I'm pretty sure he was most concerned about my immediate welfare and probably thinking, "Glad we don't have to do this very often." I obviously must have been thinking something entirely different. Who would have guessed.

I also ran a jackhammer or two at the end of a hose connected to a JOY compressor.

RG, when I was a kid and we would spot Joy compressors and point them out to my Dad, he would invariably say "different division". He rarely had anything to do with the tow-ables, the ones used for the bigger rock drills needed to be hauled on a flatbed.

In fact, he was heavily involved in the R&D and first implementation of "jumbos". A jumbo drilling rig has a large compressor powering multiple drilling booms. They are very common today, but back in the early '60's Joy developed the first of them. They were huge back then and had to be shipped on multiple trucks and assembled on site. My Dad supervised the assembly of them everywhere from Venezuela and Columbia up to Alaska and the Yukon.