The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 13

The Assembly looks again at the Firearms Act. B5. Legal Notices, B5. Obituaries, B4. Weather, B5.

QTfie iPlnlafcdpluailnquircr Section News in Brief B2 Monday, October 30, 1995 gmm JT- Melissa Dribben A shopkeeper is discovered slain in his store He opened his thrift shop at 20th and Bainbridge in 1985. He was found sitting on its floor, stabbed twice. 1 Ghouls, ghosts and grown-ups There must be some profound psychological explanation for why perfectly sane, well-adjusted, mature, responsible, ethical, adult members of society seize Oct. 31 each year to regress. I don't want to know.

The blond wig has been bought and paid for. The mini-dress of hallucinogenic colors that my mother buried in some camphor-reeking trunk in 1968 has risen from the dead. The old, knee-high, formerly cherished Frye boots that have been bur ied in the crypt of my closet so long there's green mold on the chocolate suede have been resurrected. I've tried it all on. "You look ugly," the kids said.

And I knew. 1 had arrived. For grown-ups who are infantile all the time, Halloween is not meaningful. Anyone like David Letter-man, who has already jumped into a giant bowl of chocolate pudding this year, couldn't possibly get a kick out of being blindfolded, led into the basement and having his hands i at Jtlf South 20th Street, Murray said. For that reason, police placed the time of death between 7 p.m.

Saturday and 9:50 a.m. yesterday, when the body was discovered. Murray said robbery did not appear the motive for the killing. "It seems nothing was taken from the store," he said. "We are still investigating." The victim, a native of Jamaica, was always well-turned out in a brown or burgundy vest and pressed white shirt, Esther Mackey, 82, said from a stoop across the street from the shop.

"Lord have mercy. Don't it make you shudder?" Mackey asked two other women as they whispered among themselves and watched the police work. "He was a nice little old man. Never bothered nobody." There was one aisle up the middle of the shop, a narrow corridor of weathered shag carpeting shadowed on either side by dressers, a refriger-See STABBING on B4 I shoved into a bowl of cold spaghetti, i Roseanne, who throws tantrums 1 for a living and fires anyone who doesn't think she's funny, would hardly thrill at the prospect of buy- i ing chewing gum that makes your spit turn black. He haunts the House Newt Gingrich, who spends every day of the year playing the chilling, convincing role of the vampire Les- tat, sucking the veins of the poor, the i elderly and children dry he i needn't bother putting on a pair of i fakfi fanps By Jcre Downs INQUIRER STAFF WRITER A Southwest Center City shopkeeper was found stabbed to death yesterday in the secondhand store neighbors said he had operated for 10 years.

The wooden door of the Thrifty Shop, at 20th and Bainbridge Streets, was wide open to the chilly air this morning, prompting a passerby to call police The shop owner, a man in his 50s whose identity was not released, was found dead, sitting slumped over on the floor. He had been stabbed once in the chest and once in the back, Homicide Division Sgt. Joseph Murray said. Two vacuum cleaners, a dishwasher ($40, "slightly used," according to a handwritten sign taped to its side), and a yellow velvet chair were arranged in a neat row outside the store left from the night before, when, it appears, the victim did not close his shop in the 700 block of Mother says she sold child for drug money. Everybody knew the missing boy By Jcre Downs INQUIRER STAFF WRITER Vincent McCrary has a story to tell about 2-year-old Ke-Shaun Vander-horst, the baby who is the center of a search up and down the East Coast after his mother confessed to selling him for $500 to buy drugs.

Tina Vanderhorst used to drop the toddler off at Toot's produce stand where McCrary works on Cecil B. Moore Avenue. It happened two or three times a week-. "He would cry when he saw her walking away," McCrary said. "I just let him sit there." A few minutes would go by before the boy would quiet down.

Then, he'd wriggle down from a blue plastic chair and chase two cats around iff 'If? progress. But the boom has brought fallout, too. Today, many say, North Penn is restless and irritable. Somewhere in the shuffle, the community which encompasses Hatfield, Montgomery, Towamencin and Upper Gwynedd Townships and the boroughs of Hatfield, Lansdale and North Wales seems to have lost its Besides, he makes a point of telling everyone all the time that he's a grown-up. It's a sensitive issue for him, obviously.

The only joy for him would be in throwing raw eggs at subsidized housing units. For the rest of us, however, the day presents a rare opportunity. We get to act as asinine as we want to, without the neighbors telling their children not to play in our yards anymore. I have proof. A recent survey (there are surveys for everything) shows that one-third of adults will host or attend a Halloween party this year.

Another poll showed that 90 percent of families with young children celebrate. Unpublished are the findings that 99 percent of children wish their parents wouldn't be quite so enthusiastic. Tough. To get in the right mood, I suggested to my children that we gouge out our pumpkin's eyes. (It went to seed, and the sprouts looked like maggots.

Excellent!) The costumes have been complete for weeks. We've tried our best to stoop to the occasion. (We should only be this successful in all of life's important endeavors.) 48DD and definitely Dad Before going any further, let me say, for the record, that the rubber torso was not my husband's idea. Not that he's too classy. We just got to the Halloween store first.

0 The Philadelphia Inquirer TOM GRALISH Jamie Mahoney, 9, of Mullica Hill, may have whetted appetites for Halloween in her "Last Meal" costume. She participated yesterday in South Street's festivities for the Day of the Dead, Mexico's version of All Saints Day. On this day it is believed the dead are given divine consent to visit loved ones. Mahoney won the costume contest for ages 7 to 15. Polarized schools race with N.

Penn's climate With growth have come rifts. An outsider would need a scorecard to keep track of school-issue groups. "There has been very little problem-solving from our institutions of late," said John X. Miller, executive editor of the Reporter, the daily newspaper based in Lansdale. "People have a difficulty seeing the big picture because of the growth that has occurred in this area, but also because they separate themselves, some by municipality, some by politics, some by religion, some by skin color." James Ebbenga, a former member of the North Penn Board of Education, is more blunt: "Nobody can deal with each other anymore." By Rich Honson INQUIRER STAFF WRITER Twenty years ago, North Penn was a rural patchwork of sleepy farming towns and busy boroughs, stitched together by an abiding sense of heritage and profound religious values.

Since then, growth has exploded through this central Montgomery County area, bringing wealth and Ke-Shaun Vanderhorst: The object of a massive search. the store, under folding tables stocked high with cauliflower, green peppers, oranges and beans. Ask about Ke-Shaun around the blocks surrounding the home of his 31-year-old mother on North 17th Street in North Philadelphia. There is scarcely a shop owner or neighbor See TODDLER on B4 The conflicts have set the stage for next month's school board elections, in which five Republicans and three Democrats are running for five open seats. The two parties have taken pains to portray themselves as ideological opposites.

For instance, all the Republican candidates are opposed to building a second high school in the district, where enrollment is burgeoning. The Democrats support a second high school. Experts say such deep splits are part and parcel of any growing com-See NORTH PENN on B2 James, a fourth grader, would be the fourth generation in the family to wear the orange of Tenafly High School. "I want James to have the finest education, to go to Tenafly High School, and get into a wonderful college," Foxen says. "I always thought my son would raise his own family here.

I think coming out of this school system, he can be anything he wants to be." But a state court has ordered education officials to find a way to end the racial imbalance at Englewood's virtually all-minority Dwight Morrow High School. The most recent statistics show a student body in 1993 that was 67.5 percent African Ameri-She ENGLEWOOD on B2 in keeping way. Religious fundamentalists do battle with moderates and liberals. Longtime residents openly begrudge newcomers as "outsiders." The older boroughs covet the new businesses that are invariably setting up shop in the sprawling townships. School board meetings are fraught with acrimony.

Things heated up in the summer when school board member Donna Mengel was accused of uttering an anti-Semitic remark. Folks took sides. Now, it seems, few people can agree on anything anymore. Judge Russell M. Nigro is making his 2d run at the Supreme Court.

before Election Day, Nigro was not out full-time on the campaign trail. One day he was helping settle a legal dispute in a city police advisory commission inquiry, then handling 64 docket matters a record for his court on another. "I probably have had more lawyers ftee NIGRO on B6 A pitched fight over pride and prejudice. Desegregation order fractures N.J. towns Campaign '95 Nigro eyes top court and Fumo's shadow My son, the NinjaSamuraiGrim Reaper, was deep into the knife, nun-chaku and assorted deadly weapon display.

My daughter, the Vintage Gown and Dripping Rhinestone Princess, was checking out the rock-star wigs. And the littlest one (Medieval Princess, way cool velvet costume on loan from a friend) was running around squealing at the writhing, rubber dead rats on the floor. I was trying to steer her away from the Pocahontas department when we hit the back wall. "Look, she said. "Breassss." And there they were 48DD.

Plastic or rubber. A variety of flesh tones. My son came running. "Hey, cool," he said. My daughter came running.

"Tina's so pel feci! bile saiQ, picking them up off a hook. "This is definitely DADDY!" We figure he's got the costume contest sewn up. It will be held after the haunted house. No one will notice if the cold spaghetti gets caught in his grass skirt. In preparing for the party, friends have been generous, sharing their sadistic secrets.

"Try dripping yarn," one mother suggested. "It drives the kids crazy. And don't forget raw organ meats." I wasn't sure I heard her correctly. "Organ meats," she said. "Beef livers are the best.

Make them touch it. They can't stand it." How cruel. How gross. Wow inspired. By James M.

O'Neill INQUIRER TRENTON BUREAU Donna Foxen's ribbon-tying campaign has proved so successful that thousands of orange strips of cloth now flutter from telephone poles, tree trunks and signposts on virtually every street in Tenafly, N.J. Foxen says she mounted the campaign because she cares about her son's education. She hit upon the ribbons as a way of mobilizing the town and fighting a proposal that she says threatens to devour her dreams. It calls for merging her beloved, and largely white, Tenafly public school system with the adjacent, and mostly nonwhite, Englewood schools. "This is so intensely personal for me," Foxtm says.

Her only son, for the high court. According to those who know him and Nigro himself the South Philly kid who was the first in his family to go to college is anything but a person who came up the easy way, a slacker taking advantage of political connections. Probably more than anything else, Nigro prides himself on his work ethic, and his accomplishment of climbing from humble beginnings to become a lawyer and now a judge on Philadelphia Common Pleas Court. In fact, if Nigro loses this year's race for the state's highest appellate bench, it might be because he works too hard. Uust week, with only two weeks left By Robert Zausncr INQUIRER STAFF WRITER On a street corner in South Philadelphia, the movie character Rocky Balboa told a young girl from the neighborhood that reputation means everything.

How well Russell Nigro, a Democratic candidate for the state Supreme Court, knows that to be true. Somehow, somewhere, several years ago, a public persona was created for him that was less than favorable. He was thought of by some as a political creature inextricably tied to a powerful Philadelphia politician. He was, in many eyes, Sen. Vincent Fumo's boy.

Itdidn't help him in his 1993 bid.