Pennsburg

Hotel Harley is eerily silent. Its windows are dark. Only a hastily scrawled note taped to the door attests to its fate: Closed. But no one in the Montgomery County borough of Pennsburg is lamenting the loss. Once a friendly hotel and restaurant kept bustling by the nearby railroad, Hotel Harley had become a seedy rooming house and bar - and the place that, much to this working-class community's shame, put Pennsburg on the media map. In September, hotel owner Peter Balodis, 50, was convicted of repeatedly raping a 9-year-old boy who once lived at the hotel.

The last racial incident in this tiny town in northern Montgomery County was a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1995, police said. The last time, that is, until Sunday, when a crude homemade bomb was found smeared with swastikas and racial epithets aimed at Jews and blacks. "This really isn't something we're used to up here," said Detective Jeffrey DePolo of the Upper Perk Police District, which covers Pennsburg and East Greenville. "It happened. And it's unfortunate. But this was designed to be found, not to explode," he said A passerby noticed a brown beer bottle around 9 a.m. Sunday in the 400 block of Fourth Street near a path that meanders past railroad tracks, DePolo said.

In a quick hearing in a crowded federal courtroom, Colleen "JihadJane" LaRose of Pennsburg pleaded not guilty yesterday to terrorism charges. LaRose, 46, was in the courthouse in Philadelphia just 2 1/2 minutes for arraignment on charges that she joined a plot by militant Muslims abroad to kill a Swedish artist. Wearing tight braids in her dirty-blond hair and a green jail uniform, LaRose appeared to pay little notice to the capacity crowd, though defense lawyer Mark Wilson later said she had been smiling slightly.

When industrial tycoons began spending their newly made fortunes on country estates along Philadelphia's Main Line, they did not stint on the details. Take Wootton, for example, a 50-room, neo-Tudor summer house built by newspaper publisher George W. Childs in Bryn Mawr in 1880. Through the ownership of first Childs and then his godson and beneficiary, George W. Childs Drexel, Wootton grew into a massive compound with a two-story great hall, a library with an imported Jacobean plaster ceiling, a gatehouse, a stable and garage complex, servants' cottages, an aviary, a greenhouse and a clock tower that housed a 14th-century bronze bell from Spain.

A 22-year-old Drexel University student from Montgomery County who was reported missing after leaving his job at a Pennsburg supermarket earlier in the week has been found dead, state police said Saturday. Sean Michael Buehrle disappeared after finishing a shift about 6 a.m. Tuesday at the Weis Supermarket on Pottstown Avenue in Pennsburg. Relatives had created a "Help us find Sean Buehrle" Facebook page over the last few days, asking anyone with information to call his mother.

Call it, for want of a better term, "the pizza phone number war. " The newest twist in a court battle between the former and current owners of a Pennsburg, Montgomery County, pizza restaurant involves potential customer confusion over a telephone number, and it has current owner Anthony Randazzo crying foul. But the attorney for former owner Alex Chiaro says that there's no intent to deceive customers and that the phone flap is merely the result of Chiaro's successful efforts to get a Pennsburg exchange for his pizza shop in Green Lane, several miles away.

The temperature was a surprising 82 degrees, even though it was March. Linnie Buhman and Myna Mungin were sitting in the gazebo at the small green plot that is Alma Christman Mullen Park in Pennsburg. Bright yellow daffodils swayed behind them as they ate lunch. The gazebo is at Main Street and Pottstown Road, the town's main intersection, giving the women a ringside seat to almost everything that was going on downtown in the Montgomery County borough. It was just before noon on a Friday afternoon, so the lunch crowd hadn't fully materialized yet, but there was a fair amount of activity.

A 22-year-old Drexel University student from Montgomery County who was reported missing after leaving his job at a Pennsburg supermarket earlier in the week has been found dead, state police said Saturday. Sean Michael Buehrle disappeared after finishing a shift around 6 a.m. Tuesday at Weis Supermarket on Pottstown Avenue in Pennsburg. State police said Saturday that he was found dead and that the investigation was continuing. Family members had created a "Help us find Sean Buehrle" Facebook page over the past few days asking that anyone with information call his mother.

Richard N. Reichley, 78, of Harleysville, a retired auto-parts manager and Quaker peace activist for more than 30 years, died of cancer Jan. 16 at home. Mr. Reichley's opposition to war was never more evident than in the 1970s, when he refused to pay the 60 percent of his federal income tax used for military-related expenses. When the government withheld his wages, he joined the campaign to pass a Peace Tax Fund Bill in Congress, said his wife, Mary Zuercher Reichley. The bill would amend the Internal Revenue Code to permit taxpayers conscientiously opposed to participating in war to have their income, estate or gift-tax payments spent for nonmilitary purposes only.

The Rev. Andrew P. Brown, 82, a multi-linguist who taught German to a generation of students at Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia before becoming pastor of St. Philip Neri Church in Pennsburg, died Thursday at St. Francis Country Home, Darby. Father Brown, who was also a high school instructor in art and religion between 1935 and 1962, prepared his students to serve as soldiers during World War II by teaching them to understand German troops. He had his students learn the language by playacting the roles of German captives or captors, according to his brother, John M. Brown.

A 22-year-old Drexel University student from Montgomery County who was reported missing after leaving his job at a Pennsburg supermarket earlier in the week has been found dead, state police said Saturday. Sean Michael Buehrle disappeared after finishing a shift about 6 a.m. Tuesday at the Weis Supermarket on Pottstown Avenue in Pennsburg. Relatives had created a "Help us find Sean Buehrle" Facebook page over the last few days, asking anyone with information to call his mother.

A 22-year-old Drexel University student from Montgomery County who was reported missing after leaving his job at a Pennsburg supermarket earlier in the week has been found dead, state police said Saturday. Sean Michael Buehrle disappeared after finishing a shift around 6 a.m. Tuesday at Weis Supermarket on Pottstown Avenue in Pennsburg. State police said Saturday that he was found dead and that the investigation was continuing. Family members had created a "Help us find Sean Buehrle" Facebook page over the past few days asking that anyone with information call his mother.

In a quick hearing in a crowded federal courtroom, Colleen "JihadJane" LaRose of Pennsburg pleaded not guilty yesterday to terrorism charges. LaRose, 46, was in the courthouse in Philadelphia just 2 1/2 minutes for arraignment on charges that she joined a plot by militant Muslims abroad to kill a Swedish artist. Wearing tight braids in her dirty-blond hair and a green jail uniform, LaRose appeared to pay little notice to the capacity crowd, though defense lawyer Mark Wilson later said she had been smiling slightly.

She married young and badly. She bounced checks at Pizza Hut and the grocery. She hit the bottle to excess sometimes, talked to her cats, and once attempted suicide. And, as "JihadJane," she spewed violent-sounding vitriol online for all the world - including law enforcement - to see. From what's known about her so far, Colleen Renee LaRose is not coming off as the sharpest jihadist in the suburbs. The life of the Pennsburg woman who is due in federal court a week from today on terrorism charges is sounding ever more sad than scary.

Greedy, prolific, and armed with needle-sharp spines, the European water chestnut is poised to take over Pennsburg's Lake Delmont. Thick, floating mats of the invasive plant - different from the water chestnuts used in Chinese cooking - cover half of the 13 acres of the manmade lake, about 40 miles north of Philadelphia. The species was first noticed there two years ago. "If we weren't taking it out, next year this entire lake would be covered," said Tom Maslany, a member of the Perkiomen Watershed Conservancy's board of directors.

Richard N. Reichley, 78, of Harleysville, a retired auto-parts manager and Quaker peace activist for more than 30 years, died of cancer Jan. 16 at home. Mr. Reichley's opposition to war was never more evident than in the 1970s, when he refused to pay the 60 percent of his federal income tax used for military-related expenses. When the government withheld his wages, he joined the campaign to pass a Peace Tax Fund Bill in Congress, said his wife, Mary Zuercher Reichley. The bill would amend the Internal Revenue Code to permit taxpayers conscientiously opposed to participating in war to have their income, estate or gift-tax payments spent for nonmilitary purposes only.

Victor Lemus, owner of the Country Chef bar and restaurant in this Upper Perkiomen Valley borough, was glad to see as many police as possible that scary Sunday last month. "They were here fast," said Lemus, who was tied up with one of his employees by as many as seven robbers who attacked as he was closing his Montgomery County business just after 11 p.m. Oct. 13. He said there were about five robbers inside with at least one gun and a bunch of baseball bats. He thinks two others were lookouts in the parking lot. He knows they taped his mouth and scared the life out of him. "There were two kinds of police here," Lemus said.

Around here, borough business still runs through the answering machine in Mayor Charles Shagg's living room. Every afternoon, Shagg wades through personal calls about dinners and visiting relatives to get to the gritty mayoral stuff: queries about garbage-pickup times, gripes about borough taxes. And the mayor says he's had enough. In September, Shagg asked Borough Council to install voice mail in the Pennsburg offices. "Right now, we're like a 19th-century village trying to make it in the 21st century," Shagg said, calling the borough's current phone system "ridiculous.

When industrial tycoons began spending their newly made fortunes on country estates along Philadelphia's Main Line, they did not stint on the details. Take Wootton, for example, a 50-room, neo-Tudor summer house built by newspaper publisher George W. Childs in Bryn Mawr in 1880. Through the ownership of first Childs and then his godson and beneficiary, George W. Childs Drexel, Wootton grew into a massive compound with a two-story great hall, a library with an imported Jacobean plaster ceiling, a gatehouse, a stable and garage complex, servants' cottages, an aviary, a greenhouse and a clock tower that housed a 14th-century bronze bell from Spain.

Hershey Foods Corp., the biggest U.S. chocolate-maker, announced a $275 million restructuring plan yesterday that would cut more than 1,000 jobs, eliminate selected small brands, and close three plants, including one in the northern Montgomery County town of Pennsburg. The changes are part of an effort by Richard H. Lenny, chief executive officer, to get more growth out of the Hershey, Pa., company's biggest candy brands, such as Reese's, Kit Kat and Twizzlers. Lenny said that nearly 60 percent of the company's profit came from just 11 percent of its products.