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Roofer authors children’s book

Jason Sorensen Above: The cover of Marcus Eytcheson’s new children’s book.

FAIRMONT — Marcus Eytcheson did a mystery read for his daughter’s classroom and struggled to find a book he wanted to read to the class. At the time he wished that he could have read a book about what he did for a living. That classroom visit inspired him to write his book “Up on the Rooftop.”

Eytcheson grew up in Truman and spent most of his life there. Eytcheson has been involved in construction and roofing for most of his life. In roofing Eytcheson started tearing off shingles and hauling tarps to the dumpster during clean-up. Eytcheson worked his way up on various roofing crews installing asphalt shingles, flat rubber roofs and metal roofs. Currently, Eytcheson serves as the Visionary at Local Roofing LLC which is a parent company to multiple smaller roofing locations around the Midwest with their main office located in Fairmont, named Fairmont Roofing.

“Up on the Rooftop” follows Marcos the roofer during a typical day in roofing season, from getting up in the morning to taking the truck and trailer to the job, to rolling out the tarps and starting the roof project, cleaning up and finally going home.

Eytcheson said it took him roughly 15 minutes to write the story and then he had to rewrite it so a kid could actually read it.

“When I reread it there’s a few words and way that it’s worded that are kinda goofy to me,” Eytcheson said. “But it’s the only way I could bring some of the words small enough that a child could read it.”

Start to finish when it comes to writing, getting a cartoonist to draw the pictures, and getting it published took Eytcheson about a year. Eytcheson described himself as an entrepreneur with the attitude of “I start a lot of things” and he has a lot of ideas so it was cool to him to get it done start to finish.

“This was awesome,” Eytcheson said. “I mean just seeing it on the pages, printed, the guys that did the drawing and coloring and it looks fantastic. It’s just kinda neat having the idea, following through with it, and get it done.

“Up on the Rooftop” is written in English and Spanish. A friend of Eytcheson’s from church helped with all of the translations. The reasoning behind it was to give his Hispanic coworkers a chance to read to their kids and show their kids what their job looks like.

Eytcheson already read his book at St. John Vianney School to kindergarten, first, and second-grade classrooms. Every time he read he got a little bit better as time progressed. The questions he has received have been about the bird on the very last page and the other questions don’t have a lot to do with the book or roofing in itself.

“I think they enjoyed it and I actually had a blast reading to the kids. That was probably the best part,” Eytcheson said. “It’s fun to do stuff like that and I don’t always have the time or make the time to do those things so it’s nice. When they reached out I was like absolutely we’ll come down.”

The overall message Eytcheson wanted to send is that there is a book that describes what he and other roofers do. Eytcheson said that there are books for all sorts of other jobs, but he thinks that building trades will be an issue in the future as there might be fewer people who want to do it and know how to do it.

“If it was maybe introduced to kids when they were younger it might kinda change that trend a little bit,” Eytcheson said. “I think people don’t realize how much money can be made in building trades and it gets better all of the time.

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