Penn Valley

For the fourth time in its 34 years, the annual Penn Valley Antiques Show has moved to a new location. Coincidentally, the New Hope Antiques Show, the other Thanksgiving weekend show, has done the same. At the Penn Valley show, run by the Penn Valley Women's Club for the benefit of Wills Eye Hospital, 44 dealers will be exhibiting. The show will be tomorrow and Sunday at the Twelve Caesars Conference Center on City Avenue at Stout Road. Thelma Whitmeyer, who has managed the show for the women's club for all of its 34 years, said this year's edition would be bigger and, with the new location, better as well.

A Penn Valley man has pleaded guilty to liquor-code violations and disorderly conduct in connection with a party at his residence Sept. 20 that resulted in the arrests of 30 teenagers for underage drinking. At a preliminary hearing last week before District Justice Henry J. Schireson, Stewart Young, 28, of the 800 block of Woodbine Avenue, pleaded guilty to three summary offenses in a plea agreement with Lower Merion Township police. Young agreed to pay fines totaling $1,300. The incident occurred at the home of lawyer Edward Mezvinsky, former chairman of the state Democratic Party and a former Iowa congressman.

In a 3-to-1 vote, the Lower Merion Township Planning Commission this week recommended the rejection of a proposal to subdivide a Penn Valley area into three lots. The proposal, made at the commission's Monday night meeting by Dennis Bruce Homes, would divide a wooded area east of Sandringham Road riddled with stony slopes and drainage problems into three residential lots. It would also extend Sandringham Road from its present dead end south of Mary Waters Ford Road to a 320-feet-long drive ending in a cul-de-sac with access to the subdivided lots.

Arthur B. Morgenstern, 60, who gave up a successful career as a real estate attorney and investor at age 50 to study the Torah, died of cancer May 24 at his home in Penn Valley. Mr. Morgenstern had attained financial goals in real estate and development, particularly of apartments in Philadelphia area and South Jersey, but was looking for a deeper meaning in life, his family said. He had worked 18 years with Strouse Greenberg & Co. in developing shopping centers in the area before striking out on his own in 1985.

Richard E. Gerber of Penn Valley has joined the office leasing division of Helmsley-Greenfield Inc. He will specialize in office leasing and commercial sales in the western suburbs and Main Line area, working from the company's Center City and King of Prussia offices. Gerber formerly was director of leasing for the Philadelphia office of V.M.S. Realty Partners. He has a master's degree in business administration from Adelphia University in Garden City, N.Y., and earned an undergraduate degree in business administration from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Set high on a hill, with its cobblestone driveway and stone facade, one with peaks and changing elevations, it might be a French chalet. And although the Penn Valley home of Jim Hausman and Zofia Laskowska Hausman may be all Normandy countryside in its exterior, inside, it's high-art contemporary - and a perfect setting for romance. It seems altogether fitting then that Zofia, 38, a British-born photographer and documentary filmmaker, and Jim, 45, an entrepreneur with the distinction of rescuing the more-than-90-year-old Center City Swiss Pastry Shop from demise, were actually married - one year after they met face-to-face in London - in this home on New Year's Eve 2010.

When Koji Hashimoto made plans to move his family from Osaka, Japan, to Philadelphia, he asked a colleague at the University of Pennsylvania to suggest a good school for his two young daughters, neither of whom spoke English. Gerald Lazarus, who is a professor and chairman of the dermatology department at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, recommended Penn Valley Elementary School in the Lower Merion School District. Hashimoto enrolled his children in the school at the beginning of the 1985-86 school year, and he has not been disappointed.

Tyrone Day, an aspiring pastry chef, walks over to a large stainless steel refrigerator and opens the door to reveal a chocolate cake smothered with whipped cream punctuated by cherries. Then he grins widely. "I make all different kinds of cakes," says Day, 17. A student at Lower Merion High School, Day spends part of each week at the Penn Valley Elementary School learning cooking, commercial food preparation and running a small in-school restaurant open to the public on Fridays.

Can Jews preserve their identity in contemporary U.S. society? Or does freedom erode bonds forged by generations of prejudice? Elliott Abrams, assistant U.S. secretary of state in the Reagan administration, will tackle that question in a program open to the community at 1:30 p.m. Sunday at Har Zion Temple, 1500 Hagys Ford Rd., Penn Valley. The temple's Fishman Institute for Adult Jewish Learning is presenting the free program. Abrams is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, and chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Residents here are fighting plans for a mobile-home development - but not for the usual reasons. They are afraid the homes will be too nice. Residents of the aging Pennwood Crossing mobile-home park in Fairless Hills oppose a plan to install 100 new manufactured homes in their neighborhood, fearing their own trailers' values will plummet. "The new homes will compete for buyers," said Alice Moore, a 65-year-old widow who has tried to sell her 1979 trailer for more than two years.