Ken Fitzkee and Liam Terry work as a team for Jancewicz & Son Roofing in North Walpole, NH. Ken lives right there in town; Liam lives just across The Connecticut River in Bellows Falls. Ken is what the company calls a Project Manager who gets the initial workorder from management but from that point on these two roofers-craftsmen work together out of a two-seater company truck. (Each day the company sends out seven or eight roofing crews, one insulation crew, and five or six carpentry crews ranging from two to six guys each day.) They work throughout southern Vermont, Northern Massachusetts,and Eastern NH, pretty much within a 1 ½ hr. driving radius from North Walpole.
Ken Fitzkee was born in 1983 in York, PA in south-central Pennsylvania, “a 30- minute drive from the Mason Dixon Line”. His father was a cement-truck driver, his mother a registered nurse. He graduated from high school in Wrightsville in York Township, worked as a gas station attendant for a while, then in construction, framing houses. At nineteen, he got a job with the high-end Heidler Roofing Co. in York, PA. He was trained as a coppersmith/roofer for ten years. Some buildings he worked on were The Basilica of Assumption in Baltimore; The National Institute of Health on the DC/MD border; The Armed Forces Retirement Home in DC; the Stephen Shepard Pratt Hospital in Towson, MD.
In 2009 he married Joanna Farnsworth from Springfield, Vermont; her mother and family had deep roots in Alabama. They moved to Vermont in 2015. “We first lived for three months in a condo at Magic Mountain in Londonderry. Two days or so after we moved in, I heard Jancewicz & Son was looking for an experienced roofer. I interviewed, got the job and was on a roof almost the next day. In five years, I was running my own six-man crew. The hour commute one way from got to be too much so we rented a place in North Walpole where we live now. When I started, the company had four or five crews of two to six guys. Now there are seven roofing crews, one insulation crew, and five to eight carpentry crews ranging from two to six guys. 20-30 years or so ago, roofers were considered the lowest skilled guys in the construction business. No more. The skills we have now are so varied and complex, we enjoy respect wherever we go.”
Today Joanna is a homemaker largely because “daycare is so expensive.” They have three children: Anniston, named after an Alabama town; Bennington, after the Vermont town where some of Johanna’s family lived, and Remington, “the name of the lake in PA where we first met.”
Ken is now what the company calls a Project Manager. The office prepares a job profile for him and his partner, Liam Terry, each morning and they prepare for and then head out for a day’s work. They’ll drive their worktruck and trailer loaded with a complex guttermaker to custom-make gutters for rain collection off a roof along with no end of other specialized tools and equipment for that day’s roofing project. They’ll drive anywhere from three miles up the road to towns an hour and half from North Walpole – to businesses or homes east to Sunapee, NH or west and north to homes in the Vermont ski areas and anywhere in between…. “I’m up on a roof pretty much every day of the working year. I have to say I like working in the winter. You can always either put some more layers on or take them off, but in summer IT’S JUST HOT. And we’re up on a roof so the sun is blazing and we’re sometimes working with copper sheeting.
“Last summer we were working on The Equinox Terrace Hotel Resort in Manchester, VT. We had to position 150 18”x22” pieces of copper sheeting with a solder gun and a filler of 50% lead, 50% tin along with 70’ of half-round gutter. We started in August and worked for a month AND YOU HAVE TO WEAR GLOVES. It’s a challenge but that’s part of why we love this exacting work that, in the end, adds to the health and beauty of any building we work on.”
Liam Terry was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1983. (Today his mother lives in Chester, VT.) Liam went to BUHS where he took Special Education classes because of his dyslexia. He also took the horticulture classes as well as two years of Building Trades. As part of his time at BUHS, he worked with crews at GPI Construction to learn building trades. He was later hired fulltime by GPI to do “framing, finish work, concrete work, the whole range. My wife and I bought a house in Springfield but when the price of gas went up so much around 2010, I found I was spending so much money on gas to commute from Springfield to Brattleboro and back every day that it made it tough to make the mortgage payments. I heard through the grapevine that Jancewicz & Son was looking for help. I applied and, based on my building skills, got the job. We sold our place in Springfield and moved to Bellows Falls where we rent now.
“ I love learning new skills right on through my learning difficulties. I worked with roofing crews and learned. I worked with my lead guy – now Ken Fitzkee - so I’m skilled now with metal. I install all kinds of rooves: cedar shingles, metal, slate, asphalt….. This company made sure I learned new skills. They say, “We want you to be skilled so we can support you in your career growth.”
“It’s really fun learning new things, and working with Ken. He and I always work together now and we’re the defending “Crew of the Year”. The company keeps records on customer experience, our impact on other employees, safety, quality of installation, efficiency and output……”
Liam lives with his girlfriend Jordan in Bellows Falls where she works. And they’re working on getting their own house. “When we’re not working we go fishing in Vermont a lot and plan to get a NH fishing license this year. We look for places to kayak, fish, camp and we hope to help my Mom in her new garden in Chester this coming season. And we do a LOT of recycling.”
Ken said that he and his wife and three kids are also waiting for the market to “work for us so we can buy. We do family stuff every weekend: hanging out together, hiking mainly old logging trails. They live in North Walpole so he’s got only a few-block-drive to work.
These two have one other thing in common. Given they work together pretty much every day, they share many moments literally ON rooves of some pretty fancy homes. “Last year, in beautiful weather, we worked on the roof of a house overlooking Lake Sunapee. We had to literally lift (by hand) each of the four corners of a big pyramidal skylight so we could flash – one corner at a time – under the four sides of the pyramid. (“We loved the challenge – and the view from up there was amazing!.”
And when this writer asked the two of them what else they did on weekends, both of them said pretty much the same thing: They often drive with their families to go camping or hiking and their partners or children will always end up asking them about the routes Ken or Liam chose to drive: “Did you go this way just to show us another house you worked on?”
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.