MAKING HALLOWEEN SPECIAL FOR HOSPITALIZED KIDS; YOUTH SOCCER PLAYERS GIVE SOMETHING BACK.

Byline: Dennis McCarthy 

Odds and ends from around the Valley:

For my money, the best Halloween event going on today is the one being sponsored by Region 33 of the American Youth Soccer Organization.

This afternoon, 16 players from the group will meet in the lobby of Encino-Tarzana Regional Medical Center for the first of several stops throughout the Valley, delivering plastic pumpkins filled with toys to kids in the hospital this Halloween.

``Kids everywhere will be out trick-or-treating tonight, but not these kids in the hospital,'' said Howard Smuckler, AYSO commissioner for Region 33. ``Our kids want to bring something to them.''

Besides making the day for the kids in the hospital, the visits will reinforce values that Smuckler and other adults in this league work hard to instill in their own players. Values that go well beyond the soccer field and range deep into the roots of the community where they live.

``Our key focus is volunteerism, and teaching our kids to give something back to the community that gives them so much,'' Smuckler says. ``We want them to know how lucky they are, and the joy that comes with giving.''

Maybe we'll get lucky, too, and this kind of thinking will catch on with other youth sports organizations in this city where the only value being reinforced seems to be, ``Just win, baby.''

Last year at this time, Elinor Wimmer of West Hills made her family a promise: She would be one of the thousands of people taking part in the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation Race for the Cure at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena this year.

It was a promise that brought a lot of smiles and tears to this wonderfully, close-knit family because the matriarch of their clan was, in effect, telling them not to worry - that she was going to make it through those painful chemotherapy treatments she was undergoing and beat breast cancer.

This Sunday morning, with six other members of her family beside her, Elinor will step to the starting line to fulfill that promise.

``It is terribly important to make people aware that there is a cure that can be found, and that the money raised by this race for research will help find it,'' Elinor said Thursday.

``I don't want what happened to me to ever happen to my daughters or granddaughter. If we all pull together, we can beat breast cancer.''

The event is a major fund-raiser of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, whose mission is to eradicate breast cancer by advancing research, education, screening and treatment. Last year's race raised more than $250,000 toward that goal.

Komen was a mother of two who died of breast cancer in 1980 at age 36. In 1982, with only a few hundred dollars, Komen's sister, Nancy Goodman Brinker, established the foundation in her sister's memory.

It's not too late to register and take part in the second annual Race for the Cure, which will kick off at 8:30 a.m. Sunday at the Rose Bowl with a women's 5K run/walk, followed by a one-mile fun run/walk for adults and kids, a wheelchair 5K and a 5K run/walk.

For more information, call [phone].

The gang over at the Canoga Park Mobile Home Park will be celebrating Halloween pretty early this morning with a little birthday cake and ice cream.

The guest of honor will be Joe Sikorski, who was born on Halloween in 1901 and will be celebrating his 96th birthday.

If there is a mobile-home park in the Valley with more hale-and-hearty people in it than this one, I'd like to see it.

The last time I looked in on this group, Anna Hone, who manages the park, was receiving the highest honor accorded a woman at the park: induction into the prestigious ``Dirty Old Men's Club'' that Joe founded when he moved in 25 years ago.

These are the same people who hung so tough together in the days and weeks after the Northridge Earthquake devastated so many of the homes in their park.

Whoever had a home that was still inhabitable simply opened their doors and made room for a neighbor driven out of his or her home.

Good people. Happy Birthday, Joe.