The Central New Jersey Home News from New Brunswick, New Jersey • 5

NORTH i Home News Tribune MIDDLESEX COUNTY: Cranbury man accused of raping a woman in Monroe and leading police on a chase through Monmouth County has rejected a plea offer. B2 ELIZABETH: Hiring deadline for new firefighters has been extended. B2 SUMMIT: Local man, 72, dies of injuries suffered in a weekend glider crash. B6 NEIGHBORS OBITUARIES DATEBOOK B4 B5 B6 Tuesday August 3 1, 1999 Local housing to get face lift City public A pleasant, hot perfect, hometown By KATHLEEN HOPKINS STAFF WRITER The city Housing Authority has been awarded a $4.1 million fed remaining family complex and to spruce up its four senior-citizen apartment buildings. The money is from a modernization grant from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The grants are intended to be used for physical and management improvements to public housing, said Rep. Robert Menendez, D-13th DisL "This money will enhance the living conditions for those men, women and children who call public housing home," Menendez said. The greatest portion of the grant, $1.2 million, will be used to renovate the courtyards of the authority's oldest public housing facility Mravlag Manor, a complex of 423 apartments built in 1939 in the city's Bayway section, officials said. "The whole place is going to be redone," said authority Executive Director William Jones. The project will include installing benches, brick pavers, "tot lots," basketball courts, barbecue pits and game tables in Mravlag Manor's outdoor areas, officials said.

Jones said that with the exception of two existing basketball courts and some malfunctioning sprinklers, there are no recreation facilities in the complex. Mravlag Manor will be the authority's only remaining family complex once Migliore Manor and Pioneer Homes are torn down and replaced with lower-density housing under the federal HOPE VI program. Demolition of Migliore Manor began last year, and construction of some of the replacement housing is under way. See Grant, Page B2 ELIZABETH eral grant that will be used to build outdoor recreation facilities for the agency's last My grandfather arrived in Union Township in 1892, and my par-' ents moved out in 1992. That century was very good to us.

The Union schools were good, friends were good, the Church was good and the youth baseball was good. Union had, and still has, a great downtown and the funkiest section of Route 22, starting with The Flagship, where Phil Rizzuto sold men's clothing in the off-season. I was reminded last week Union wasn't always posing for Norman Rockwell paint "People ask me all the time what it feels like to be a twin It 's the only thing I know. HERBERT HUTT TWIN double life VEi PROJECT FOR PEDESTRIANS Safer walking making strides; By MARY ANN BOURBEAU STAFF WRITER A. Plans are under way to use an $80,001) Town Center Grant to spruce up the are around the Metuchen train station and promote pedestrian safety.

I Now that Middlesex Water Co. has completed its cleaning and lining of the pipe's on Main Street, and the county is finishing the road resurfacing, the borough can spend the money it received from the statfc Department of Transpor- Ivms skwe ings. Raised in Union at the same time was Linda Balabanow. She attended 1 Mother RICK MALWITZ Id it At top, identical twins Herbert and Stewart Hurt, 70, as they looked as babies. At left, the Hutt twins today, at Stewart Hurt's Woodbridge law office.

METUCHEN tation in January. Near the train station, a new street lamp will be installed, some sidewalks will be replaced, and trees and shrubs will be planted. Also planned near the train station is a traffic-calming device, which involves tapering curbs some six feet into each side of the roadway to narrow the road. Vehicles traveling north on Main Street will see the curbs tapering in after they go under thfc train trestle and approach the pedestrian crosswalk. "Studies show that these kind of devices give the driver the visual perception of the road narrowing, causing them to slow down," said Mayor Ed O'Brien.

He feels pedestrians shouldn't have yield to the traffic, but traffic should yield to pedestrians. I "When you are in cities out West and you step off the curb, traffic comes to stop," he said. "We're on a crusade to see that we have that in Metuchen. Over timg, See Walk, Page B2 Top photo courtesy of the Hutt Family Photo at left by TANYA BREEN Staff photographer Similarities include both beating cancer By RICK MALWITZ STAFF WRITER Another fight likely on tab for overtime i tewart and Herbert Hutt can tell all the usual identical-twin stories. They switched dates, and took tests 1 for each other in gym class.

At the Pierre Hotel in New York, Stewart approached and embraced his brother, or so he thought, be- fore crashing into a full- SetonHigh School in Clark before transferring to Union High School. She was a clerk at a drug store in Ros-elle. On March 27, 1969, her mother told police that Linda, then 19, did not return home from work. One month later, she was identified as the dead woman found floating in the Raritan River in Woodbridge. Her nude body was wrapped in an 18-foot chain and an extension cord.

Identification was made with dental charts. Her dentist was my dentist, and in his long practice, it was the only time his charts were used to identify a corpse, No one was ever charged with her murder, though evidence then and now points to Robert Zarinsky of Linden. Last week, Zarinsky's sister told authorities that Zarinsky drove her to the Roselle shopping center where Balabanow worked. The Saturday after Balabanow disappeared, Zarinsky gave his mother a radio that belonged to Balabanow. Also in 1969, a woman from Atlantic Highlands was murdered, and Zarinsky was convicted of that killing.

When police investigated that murder, they found hair on Zarinsky's hammer that matched Balabanow's. Despite evidence linking Zarinsky to Balabanow's murder, he was never charged. But this month, after police linked Zarinsky to the 1958 murder of a Rahway police officer, his past is getting a fresh look. His sister suspects Zarinsky may have killed as many as 10 young women. The murder of aeen-ager from my hometown was not its only blemish.

i When I was in grammar school, a high school student died of a drug overdose, and the story was so unusual for the innocent 1950s, it was featured in Look magazine. In 1960, a man from Highland Park killed four people in North Brunswick, and then murdered two Franklin police officers. A statewide manhunt led to brush behind Hy-Way Bowl on Route 22, where we bowled three games for $1 on Saturday mornings. During the shootout, the man shot himself in the head. He confessed to the six murders before dying a month later.

Meanwhile, at that time, Union practiced apartheid, Confining Virtually all blacks to the Vauxhall section of town. Union's grammar schools were so segregated that the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare made it the first municipality north of the Mason-Dixon line charged in a federal civil-rights lawsuit. I look back at Union and accentuate the positive realizing, of course, evil often got equal time. Rick Malwitz's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.

His e-mail address is rickinjersey.com WOODBRIDGE length mirror. When the two were on the board of di School in 1947, and applied for college at a time when most colleges and universities reserved places in their freshman classes for returning veterans. They recalled the Wood-bridge High School valedictorian was rejected everywhere he applied, until the principal, a graduate of Syracuse University, pulled strings at his alma mater. Yet the Hurts were accepted at Johns Hopkins University. "I am convinced they accepted us because we were twins, and that was a novelty," said Herbert.

College was on few high school students' radar screens, said Stewart. "We'd never been to a college campus before getting to Johns Hopkins. Our (admission) interview was at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York." Following their graduation from Johns Hopkins, they went together to Harvard University: Stewart earned a degree at the law school, while Herbert earned a degree at the business school. After serving in the Army, and working briefly in New York, Stewart returned to Middlesex County, working as an attorney in Perth Amboy before creating a law firm in Woodbridge with his brother-in-law, Gordon Berkow. After serving in the Navy, Herbert worked for a publisher in New York before joining U.S.

Home and Development Corp. of Lake-wood. Both Stewart and Herbert married the daughter of a doctor, and each of the two See Twins, Page B2 By SARAH GREENBLATT STAFF WRITER A longstanding dispute about overtime spending in the Sheriffs Department was revived last night, when the Board of Freeholders grudgingly introduced a resolution allocating emergency funds to cover several weeks' worth of costs. Setting the stage for a renewed legal showdown with Sheriff Joseph Spicuzzo, the board agreed to vote Thursday on ah emergency appropriation of $50,000 to cover overtime costs through Sept. 25.

The board agreed not 1 Photo courtesy of the Hutt Family Identical twins Herbert and Stewart Hutt, now 70, row a boat as teen-agers. "It -made sense," said Herbert. "We were made the same way." Today they have something else in common: They are cancer survivors. The Hutt brothers were raised in Wood-bridge in the '30s and '40s the perfect place in the perfect time, they agree. "It was the type of place that when WOR (radio) wanted to cover a Memorial Day parade they came to Woodbridge," said Stewart.

They graduated from Woodbridge High rectors of a development company only Herbert was available for a picture. A negative of Herbert's image was flipped and used as Stewart's photo, and more than a few people remarked that they really didn't look like twins after all. The brothers, who turned 70 together this month, have one more story, with a serious angle. Stewart had had a routine blood test to test for prostate cancer, and the results suggested he had nothing to worry about. At the same time Herbert had a similar test, and cancer was detected.

Herbert told his brother to forget the good test results, and get a thorough exam. He did, and cancer was detected in Stewart, too. "My wife married me for better or worse, but not for brunch. MIDDLESEX -COUNTY This year's county budget limited overtime spending to $690,000. In 1998, the county allocated nearly $1.3 million for overtime.

a STEWART HUTT TWIN to allocate additional funds beyond that date and to notify state Superior Court Judge Eugene D. Serpentelli that the sheriff had violated a court order to adhere to the departmental budget that the freeholders approved in March. Serpentelli had issued the order in May as part of an agreement brokered after Spicuzzo filed a suit claiming that the freeholder-approved county budget would keep him from providing adequate security in the courthouse. This year's county budget limited overtime MSDDUESEX COUNTY COLLEGE School president touts technology, enrollment gains By DORE CARROLL STAFF WRITER Rising enrollment after years of decline, combined with ongoing building and technology projects, mark next week's start of a promising fall semester at Middlesex County College. Registration, which begins Sept.

7, is expected to top 10,600 students, 2 percent more than last year, according to administration officials. to wire every classroom and office to a fiber-optic network, then link those computers to the Internet. Half of that work has been completed since the spring. Older personal computers those not compatible with the network or not Y2K-compliant have been replaced. More than 300 computers have been installed in student labs in five academic buildings, and in the New Brunswick and Perth Amboy centers.

By November, all faculty offices also will have computers with Internet access and network connections, college President John Bakum said during his State of the College address yesterday. "The face of the campus is changing substantially, and for the better," he said in his speech See MCC, Page B2 The final figure will not be tallied until the registration deadline, two weeks after classes begin. Students returning to the college's sprawling Woodbridge Avenue campus next week will see construction crews working on a new bookstore and the Gateway Building, both scheduled for completion in the spring. MCC's technology experts will work through the end of the year spending to $690,000. In 1998, county Administrator Walter DeAngelo said, the county allocated nearly $1.3 million for overtime.

To date, departmental overtime spending has exceeded that limit by about $25,000, county Comptroller Albert P. Kuchinskas said. Some of those overtime costs were See Tab, Page B2 0 Call us: Cocuzzo, Woodbridge bureau manager, (732) 602-0700 Fax: (732) 726-0801 E-mail: woodbrdgthnt.com On the Internet: www.injersey.comfjnt.