Best Of

I helped strip and shingle my first house when I was 10-12 along with my 8-10 year old brother and my Uncle Jim (my father’s twin).  We helped my uncle shingle his girlfriend’s house one summer.  Can you imagine 8-12 year olds on a roof helping shingle a house these days?  And yes, we were actually helping.  I have helped shingle a friend’s house, and my mom’s house after a nasty hailstorm back in 1990-91.  The same storm that cratered my friend’s new pickup and mine, they were the first new vehicles either of us had bought.  We had bought them the same week, and we had them less than a month.  I was at his house at the time, just a couple of blocks from my mom’s house.  Some of the hail was tennis ball sized, with many racquetball/handball sized, and pretty hard.  Interestingly, no windows were broken.  I was ~25 and the biggest hail I had ever seen up to that point was maybe dime sized.  Just my luck, first new vehicle, and the biggest damn hail I ever saw.  It’s still the biggest hail I have seen, but a few storms since then have come close.

Started roofing as a summer job when I was 16. We didn't have compressors, hose lines, nail guns. Not to mention truck/cranes to forklift the bundles onto the roof.
They've come a long way since I was a pup...
Second bowl, same pipe and blend while showing off the annual fall "firing" of one our "burning bushes" (don't know the real name of these shrubs)...