Charlotte Joy Scalese loved trucks. Like plenty of small children she was drawn to the big, loud, working machines of the world, and in the summer of 2022 she got to stand beside one of the strangest and most beloved of them all: the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, at the Ashley Lauren Foundation's Touch-a-Truck festival. A photograph from that day shows her in a pink shirt, grinning next to the giant hot dog on wheels.
Charlotte was born in Neptune on April 21, 2017, to David and Laura Scalese. She had two younger brothers, Sebastian and Theo, and a life full of the ordinary things she loved: going to school every day, painting, riding bikes, camping with her "Poppy," beach trips, and the rides at Fantasy Island. Her favorite restaurants were Jersey Mike's and Chick-fil-A. She gave, by her family's account, the world's biggest hugs.
In 2023, after a fight with Stage 4 neuroblastoma, Charlotte died at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. She was six. Her family asked that donations be made in lieu of flowers to The Ashley Lauren Foundation, a Brielle-based nonprofit that helps New Jersey children with cancer and their families. Her favorite color was pink, and mourners were invited to wear it.
That same foundation is now preparing the fifth annual Charlotte Joy Touch-A-Truck Festival, which returns to the East Freehold Showgrounds at 1500 Kozloski Road on Saturday, October 10, 2026, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a rain date of Sunday, October 11. General admission is $20, and every dollar of proceeds goes to the foundation's work.
The event's roots run deeper than Charlotte's story. The Ashley Lauren Foundation was incorporated in New Jersey on July 6, 2005, by Monica Vermeulen, but its origin goes back to when Vermeulen's three-year-old daughter Ashley was diagnosed with kidney cancer. What Vermeulen found in the years that followed was that the medical system could treat her daughter but that families were left to absorb everything else on their own: the bills, the travel, the lost work, the sheer weight of it. She built an organization to carry some of that. Ashley, who survived, has grown up alongside the foundation that bears her name and has helped her mother run parts of it.
For years the foundation ran a touch-a-truck fundraiser of its own. Then Charlotte died, and the event was renamed for her. Laura Scalese, Charlotte's mother, now works as the foundation's resource director and helps organize the festival that carries her daughter's name. "It's a ministry for me," she told the Asbury Park Press.
What she and the foundation have assembled is, by their billing, the largest Touch-A-Truck event on the East Coast. The third annual edition in 2024 drew close to 200 trucks, and the lineup has only grown. Fire engines from several Monmouth County municipalities, New Jersey State Police cruisers both marked and unmarked, a command truck, a boat, and a helicopter that lands on site. Tri-axle dump trucks, excavators, roll-offs, big rigs, school buses and vintage buses. Classic and custom cars, exotic sports cars, race cars. The Wienermobile returns, as does an inflated Re/Max hot air balloon. Six tractor-trailers from Wreaths Across America, the veterans' wreath-placement movement, have appeared in past years. What makes the roster remarkable is that nearly all of it is donated: the vehicles, the operators, the fuel, the hours. "All the participants are all donating their services, which is really wonderful," Scalese said.
The premise is simple and, for a certain age group, irresistible. Children are not just allowed to look at the trucks. They are invited to climb on them, sit in the driver's seat, pull the levers, and ask the people who operate them what everything does.
Around the vehicles, the showgrounds fill with the rest of a festival. Stage shows and live music, costumed characters walking the grounds, bubble shows, a tractor hay ride, an interactive photo booth, and meet-and-greets. There are mechanical rides, pony rides, face painting, a petting zoo, a mobile arcade trailer, and games. Local food trucks handle the meals and desserts, and local artisans and businesses set up vendor booths. General admission covers the Touch-A-Truck fields, the entertainment, the hay rides, the photo booth, and giveaways from the companies represented on site; the mechanical rides, ziplining, face painting, pony rides, petting zoo, and vendors cost extra. The first 240 families through the gate get a free soft pretzel from Wawa.
Tickets are sold through Eventbrite and through the foundation's website, where sponsorship, vendor, and vehicle inquiries go to Laura Scalese at the foundation's Brielle office. The rain date matters: this is an outdoor event on open fields, and October in Monmouth County does what it likes.
There is a particular kind of arithmetic at work in an event like this. A child who loved trucks dies, and her mother goes to work for the organization that helped her family, and then a field fills with trucks, and thousands of families pay twenty dollars each to climb on them, and the money goes to other families in the middle of the worst year of their lives. The Ashley Lauren Foundation has been doing that arithmetic since 2005. On October 10, it will do it again, with Charlotte's name on the gate.