Raising Bucks For A Birthday Bash Enthusiasm Is High, Bank Balances Low As Bucks Townships Plan Their Tricentennials.

You can't start planning your birthday party too early when you're going to be 300 years old. There's a lot to do.

Of course, you'll need balloons, banners and brass bands - and the money to pay for them. You'll want souvenirs for the guests - and the money to have them made. You'll probably want to give a special gift that will last into the future - and that will cost money, too.

Four Lower Bucks communities, well aware that money is hard to come by in this recession year, are already working on their 1992 tricentennial celebrations. They will commemorate Sept. 27, 1692, when Bucks County, too unwieldy to be managed as a unit, was divided into its seven original townships: Falls, Makefield, Middletown, Buckingham (now Bristol), Wrightstown (including Newtown), Southampton (including Warminster) and Salem (now Bensalem).

"In the past 20 or 30 years there have been so many changes there's not much sense of community any more," said Suzanne Dillon, who heads the Middletown Tricentennial Committee. "People go to the mall and to work, and that's it. They say they don't know we're 300 years old. Yet we're older than the United States."

But if the ideas and enthusiasm of the organizers are the measure of success, Middletown, Lower Makefield, Bensalem and Falls (Langhorne and Upper Makefield may join in later) will all have fabulous parties.

Bensalem has a list of more than 100 events, including a weekend of competitive games. Falls, which already held a tricentennial logo contest, is working on a country fair with jugglers and clowns and re-enactments of historic battles. Middletown is planning a community picnic and a calendar illustrated by local artists. And there's much, much more.

The first planning session in Lower Makefield this spring brought an overflow crowd of more than 20 organizations - Scout troops, the fire and rescue squad, and local banks and real estate developers, according to Florence White, who helped.

"We kept adding more and more chairs. The phone started ringing from other people who wanted to help. I was beside myself, I was so thrilled," she said.

Raising money to pay for the projected festivals and picnics, fun-runs and sing-ins, history books and calendars is proving difficult, however.

"The economy is really bad right here," said Dorothy Schilling of the Falls Township Tricentennial Committee. "So we're not looking for pie in the sky."