By Chloe Cramutola
Eight-year-old Lucas Crocker trunk-or-treated for Halloween in 2023, but it was a business card – not candy – that made it memorable.
Dressed as Darth Maul, Crocker trekked from car to car at H. Ashton Marsh Elementary School with his aunt, Veronica Pastures. His bag brimming with treats, Crocker came across a business card with a red firefighter emblem on a wood-brown background.
“‘Mom, this is so cool, it looks like a fireman symbol,’” his mother, Kristin Burns, recalled him saying. “‘I need to bring this to my teacher and show it to her.’”
Although Burns told her son not to take it to school, he tucked it in his backpack anyway – and he held it up on picture day.
“I got the email that his pictures are in, and that’s when I found out he posed with [the business card],” Burns said.
Pastures said she didn’t even know how or why the photographer allowed her nephew to have it in the photo.
But then the card disappeared, Burns said, and she didn’t know if her son kept it or if the school threw it away. She did not know the name of the company.
This past Halloween, Pastures, who is also a Girl Scouts leader, was setting up with the Girl Scouts of Greater Galloway at a trunk-or-treat in Smithville. The event featured a circle of just 20 trunks, and Pastures happened to spot a familiar-looking truck.
“I look up and I’m like, ‘That’s the guy. That’s the company,’” Pastures said.
She went over to the truck and met Ryan Alexander, owner of Alexander Fine Design Construction and Painting, and told him she had a really funny story to share about her nephew.
“I couldn’t believe the story,” Alexander said. ‘I said, ‘Oh, we’ve got to meet him. We’ve got to celebrate this.’”
While the fireman logo did not actually belong to a fire department, Burns said her son thought construction was cool, too.
On Dec. 27, Alexander brought Crocker in to see the shop.
“‘Are we going to build something today?’” Burns recalled her son saying.
Alexander’s team did not build anything, but they put together a basket of construction toys and gave the boy some apparel. Alexander also showed him around the office and talked to him about construction.
“We kind of made him the [Vice President] for the day,” Alexander said. “He recommended I fire one guy, just joking around, and then we took him and his mom out to breakfast.”
Alexander found Crocker was not interested in construction or becoming a firefighter, but the boy comes from a family of skilled trade workers. Burns said her dad has always been in construction, while Crocker’s father was an elevator mechanic.
“Nowadays, it’s manual labor, it’s not a cool job and you’ve got to go to college,” Alexander said. “The more you don’t have people working in this industry and not wanting to do it, the more that hole has to get filled somehow.”
Alexander said he would like to see more kids interested in the trades, such as home remodeling, plumbing and HVAC.
“There’s good money to make, and it’s a good job. It’s a prideful job,” Alexander said. “You’re transforming people’s homes. You’re taking their biggest asset and taking their idea and creating what they want.”
Still, Burns said her son wants to be a YouTuber or to take over her job as a manager at Doyle’s Pour House in Barnegat.
“As long as he’s happy, and he doesn’t live in my house until he’s 45, it’s fine with me,” Burns said. “I always tell him that he has to have a job, but I would like him to be happy.”
Burns later sent Alexander her son’s school photo. Now it is hanging up in the AFD Construction and Painting shop, showing that Crocker will always be an honorary member of the team.
