MEMBER SPOTLIGHT –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– me with all their best foremen and set me up to go to the Local 52 apprentice school. I went through five years of schooling and working in the field before I was given my full tile setter’s union book. For the next three years I was a journey- man tile setter on various projects throughout Manhattan and became a foreman for the company.” And one important thing he learned along the way was that “the reward for good work was more work. ” Moving from the union to breaking out on his own About this time though, work started to get tight and he was out of a job. After three months, Shocker went out on his own looking for work – knocking on doors of new home builders and going into local tile stores with pictures of his proj- ects. Soon, tile stores sought him out as a good, honest setter they could refer to customers. “Then one day I got my first big break – a small contractor for whom I worked got hired by the folks who invented caller ID,” he said. “They bought an old IBM building in Valhalla, N.Y. for their headquarters. He hired me to do four lobbies, a ton of bathrooms and a big cafeteria. I couldn't do this with the small crew I had, so I reached out to all my old foremen and good setters and finish- ers I had met in the union who were still out of work to give me a hand.” This job put his company Shocker Tile and Marble on the map, which had a great run and developed an excellent reputation for doing out- standing work. Enter the recession in 2007, which decimated work all over the country. Shocker went back to his union roots and called Port Morris Tile and Terrazzo, and the new big guy on the block, Jantile, Inc. Owner Anthony Casola hired Shocker the day he called, and he worked there for four years until city work evaporated. Ever resourceful, Shocker switched gears to take advantage of the wave of residential projects as his own company, Dutchess County Tile. His goal for his small company was to do high-end jobs, one at a time. Then in 2014 – the first of four years his company was named Houzz Contractor of the Year (2014 - 2017), his 18-year old son DJ (Darin Jr.) Shocker decided that the school route was not for him and asked if he could come work for Darin. “I was happy and it reju- venated me,” he said. “It gave me new energy.” Shocker worked for union compa- nies Port Morris Tile and Terrazzo and Jantile, as well as running his own open-shop compa- nies, Shocker Tile and Marble and Dutchess County Tile, the latter of which was named Houzz Contractor of the Year for four years. 58 TileLetter | 2018