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.

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.

First house I ever roofed was my parents. My brother, Dad and I did it together. He wasn't a roofer but he was a great engineer and a special person that knew how to work with his hands. Hot summer Delaware days. We had to stop roofing at about 11am in order to not have your feet burning through your shoes. Miss him a lot.

I love my dad. Greatest man I've ever known. Hardest worker I've worked beside. Never paddled me without me having full understanding of why I was getting it, and never ended without being told I was loved. Most painful paddling I ever got was when he told me I was to old to paddle, and I was paddling him, because he had obviously failed in his job as a dad.... Long story.

Dad expected a lot. He was a real bugger to work for. Got fired a few times. Learned a lot from those firings.

We don't work the same, we don't do the same kind of roofing, things have changed a lot since then... but I couldn't have asked for a better dad, he didn't drink, cuss or fail to come home at night. He taught us to respect the woman beside us by leading through example. He didn't see a lot of baseball games, and as a kid, sitting beside the bathtub and washing his knee before dinner was the only real time we had. It was off to the office right after dinner. I don't often live his example of work these days, but he did, and continues to at 73, show me what a man can get done in a day when he puts his mind to it. He was a tough taskmaster and I am darn thankful that we as hard as he was.

About the time I was 7 or 8 we started doing break metal for the next day's job together. I wasn't of much help on the shear or lifting the break arm, but the extra set of hands were helpful in lining up breaks and I had just enough ass to set the lock arm. Good times they was.

Any truth to the father being the milkman rumors that have been going around for years twill59?

My sister-in-laws husband delivered milk for years. When the 5th (unexpected) child was confirmed she said to the Dr. "I'm going to have to kick the milkman out of my bed so this doesn't happen again" He was a bit flustered until she explained the connection.