Youth Group

Masjid. Imam. Words that conjure up visions of a minaret or the Koran. These are words the Youth Fellowship group from the First Presbyterian Church in Haddonfield will learn about today when they visit a mosque in Philadelphia. A masjid is a mosque. An imam is a leader of prayer. In just a 30-minute trip from Haddonfield, the students will step back through hundreds of years of cultural and religious history and learn about the religion of Islam. Their trip is part of a month-long Youth Fellowship program on Iraq.

The leader of a youth group at Carmel Presbyterian Church in Glenside, Montgomery County, has been charged with indecently assaulting a 13-year-old girl whom he supervised in confirmation classes, authorities said. Norman Brooks, 61, initiated a series of incidents involving inappropriate contact with the girl between January and April of this year, according to Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman. Brooks, a Glenside resident, has been charged with indecent assault, corruption of minors, and endangering the welfare of children.

George C. Waters, a maintenance worker from Germantown who operated his own youth group, died March 10 of a heart attack. He was 57. For the last 20 years, Waters and his wife Juanita operated the George C. Waters Futures Youth Organization, a group of 400 to 500 children. Waters suffered the heart attack while he was teaching basketball to his age 12-and-under group at a neighborhood school gymnasium. "This is the way he would have liked to go, doing what he loved best," his wife said.

The former treasurer of the West Bradford Youth Athletic Association was arraigned yesterday on charges that he stole nearly $100,000 from the youth sports group. Timothy J. Malloy Jr., 46, of Downingtown, is charged with multiple counts of theft by unlawful taking, receiving stolen property, and forgery in the theft of $99,790 from November 1997 through December 1999, according to the Pennsylvania State Police. A single forgery felony count carries a maximum sentence of 10 years, and single felony counts of theft and receiving stolen property carry seven-year maximum sentences.

Marianne McEllroy Gillespie, 46, a dedicated leader and co-founder of Our Lady of Mount Carmel parish's youth group 13 years ago in Berlin Borough, died Tuesday at home after a long battle with cancer. A Berlin Borough resident, Mrs. Gillespie was a registered nurse who last worked for Patricia's Nurses in Atco. Her active leadership in the parish was honored in 1994 when Bishop James T. McHugh presented her and her husband, James J. Gillespie Jr., with the Bishop's Medal for her efforts in the youth group and with other parish ministries.

After a string of strikeouts, the Holy Terrors Youth Organization seems to be hitting home runs. The group has regained permission to use bathrooms at Mayfair Elementary School during sports practices, ending a six-week lockout. And the city Recreation Department has gone to bat for the group in its 25- year-long quest for a clubhouse. Recreation Department officials have asked that an existing lease between the department and the city School District be amended to allow the Holy Terrors to put a clubhouse on Mayfair Elementary School grounds.

Jim Durbano likes to party and dance. So he was ready with his 75-cent admission fee, as he queued up to get into the monthly dance sponsored by the senior high youth fellowship of West Chester United Methodist Church. Durbano was among more than 40 people with mental retardation who had come to socialize this month at the dance, which the youth group has held on the first Sunday of the month for 30 years. The dancers, ranging in age from 20s to 50s, come in vans and cars from group homes in the area.

"Ten-hut!" On a rainy Saturday morning in January, the traditional military call to attention echoed across the gray concrete and idle helicopters in a vast hangar of Willow Grove Naval Air Station. Two precise rows of Marines, in fatigues, caps and polished combat boots, stood stiffly. "About face!" The ringing voice of command belonged to a baby-faced 12-year-old. The whole unit, as a matter of fact, is made up of boys, ages 8 to 18. It is a local branch of the Young Marines, a Marines-sponsored youth group designed to teach military-style discipline and physical training.

A basket of prayer intentions was packed along with sleeping bags as 24 members of the Delaware County Catholic Youth Organization head west on a pilgrimage to see Pope John Paul II. They will join more than 130 teens from the Philadelphia Archdiocese scheduled to leave from the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul in Philadelphia at 8 a.m. Sunday on a bus trip to Denver. There, they will hear the Pope address more than 400,000 people at World Youth Day 1993. Sleeping in gyms and private homes, the youths will not be on a vacation but rather a spiritual journey, said Colleen Corcoran of Havertown, a member of the Catholic Youth Organization.

They said they just wanted to use the civic center on New Jersey Avenue - a building that they believed was constructed for people like them. But no one seemed to agree. Not the mayor. Not the township solicitor. Certainly not the trustees of the the West Atco Civic Center. It has been a year since Derek Davis and his youth organization, West Atco Youth in Action, took their plea to the township: help them gain access to a community center that was open, maybe, all of 10 hours in 1993 for local groups.

New gym fees designed to hold down taxes could "wipe out" or sharply curtail basketball and cheerleading programs for more than 800 Bensalem children, leaders of three youth groups say. "If we can't get [the fees] reduced, it will basically wipe out the basketball program," David Tressler, president of Valley Athletic Association, said last week. The Bensalem school board in June approved fees of $70 to $300 an hour to help cover energy costs for its 10 gyms, including a new high school gym scheduled to open in the fall.

ALMATY, Kazakhstan - Traffic police in a southern Kazakhstan city have complained of a rising tide of motorists replacing their license plates with signs reading "I Love Sex. " Online news channel Mir reported yesterday that one of them, a 19-year old motorist in Kyzyl-Orda, was fined $1,000 for pinning the provocative plate to his SUV. The station also showed police footage of another car bearing a more chaste plate honoring a woman: "I Love...

A viewing for Andrew Leonard Hicks Jr., 17, will be from 3 to 6 p.m. Sunday, July 25, at Christ Community Church, 1190 Phoenixville Pike, West Chester. A memorial service will be at the church at 1 p.m. Monday, July 26. Burial will be in Oaklands Cemetery, West Chester. Mr. Hicks died in a hiking accident at Muir Beach, Calif., Monday, July 18, while on vacation with his family. He was about to enter his senior year at West Chester Henderson High School, where he played on the soccer and ice hockey teams and was a member of the ski club.

DORA SCHWENDTNER, 16, Szablcs Prem, 20, and their young friends set out from their centuries-old town in Hungary only last week to visit Philadelphia and the cradle of American liberty. It appears now that the pair will never get to tell exciting stories to their friends and family back home about their adventures. They were identified late yesterday by the Coast Guard as the two members of a Hungarian student cultural-exchange program with a West Chester church who were still missing after a Duck boat was struck by a barge on the Delaware River.

Superintendent Arlene Ackerman praised a youth group during yesterday's School Reform Commission meeting for launching a campaign to quell youth violence. She vowed to stand behind the student group - which plans to present the district with recommendations - to gauge from the youngsters an effective way to deal with an issue she called a "public-health threat to this city. "If we had an outbreak of more than 15,000 cases of measles in the schools this would be considered a health threat," she said, referring to the number of serious reported incidents in the district.

Emily Josephine McWilliams Abel, 86, of Willow Grove, a former nursery school director and president of the Upper Moreland school board, died of complications from Alzheimer's disease Friday at the Rydal Park nursing home in Rydal. Mrs. Abel graduated from Cheltenham High School. She earned a bachelor's degree in early-childhood and elementary education from Temple University, and a master's degree in school administration from the University of Pennsylvania. She married Robert Abel in 1946.

WITH MONDAY'S death of legendary Phillies broadcaster Harry Kalas , we wondered when fans would see the SuperPretzel commercial he was to appear in, taped last month in Ardmore. "We were deeply saddened by Harry's sudden passing, as he'd become part of our work family, too. At this point no decisions have been made as far as the release of the SuperPretzel commercial," said Tom Weber , VP of operations at J&J Snack Foods, which owns SuperPretzel. We called Harry's voice-over agent, Marc Guss of the William Morris Agency, to see what additional work Harry had lined up. Guss said he couldn't talk about any planned projects, but he remembered Harry, as we all do, as "the ultimate gentleman with the highest level of character.

The Rev. Hugh W. Smith, 81, retired director of public relations for International Ministries of the American Baptist Churches USA who served as a missionary in Hong Kong for nearly 20 years, died of an apparent heart attack Dec. 15 at Elm Terrace Gardens, a retirement community in Lansdale. Mr. Smith's decision to trade pastoring churches for missionary work may have had something to do with a chance meeting with a homeless man in a coffee shop. Mr. Smith, then a recently discharged World War II veteran working for the telephone company, was in the midst of considering a call to the ministry.

A former top prosecutor in the Bucks County District Attorney's Office yesterday was charged with having a sexual relationship with a minor while volunteering in a church youth group. Anthony Cappuccio, 31, of Hilltown Township, was charged with three counts each of endangering the welfare of children, corrupting minors, and furnishing alcohol to minors. Cappuccio and the 17-year-old boy were discovered partially dressed at about midnight Sept. 5 in a car parked at a shopping center in Quakertown, according to court documents.

J Robert Zensen Sr., 84, of Haddon Heights, died July 11 of cancer. Mr. Zensen, a 51-year resident of Haddon Heights, was an early recreational runner, lacing up his jogging shoes each evening starting in the late 1960s. "He'd come in all sweaty and happy," said his daughter, Susan Merrill. "He learned early on running was his way to relieve stress. " Mr. Zensen was born in Chester in 1923. He joined the Army in 1943, serving with the 49th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Brigade for three years in Central Europe and the Rhineland.