“Parenting is not an easy job and parents need all the help they can get. A scout leader emerged some years ago. Her hands have not stopped helping yet,” first stanza of poem to Adele Trapp by Ruth Andrea Hurd Foreman, 1998.
For 53 years, Adele U. Trapp has served as den mother to Cub Pack 263 of the Greater New York Council of Boy Scouts of America located at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church.
She has received many awards for her work in Scouting where she has been acknowledged for “helping ordinary kids become extraordinary adults.” Mrs. Trapp’s own extraordinary accomplishment will be published worldwide in 28 languages in Guinness World Records, the premier international publication of outstanding and unusual achievement.
Born in Barbados, W.I. on Feb. 26, 1914, Mrs. Trapp will celebrate her 97th birthday in February. She was a founding Board Member of St. Marks Day School and recently retired from the NYC Department of Education where in 2008 she received a Quality of Work life Program Award for 30 years of dedicated service.
At the time of her retirement she was the oldest worker in the Department of Education, a feat acknowledged in a feature article in the NY Daily News (January 17, 2005). Mrs. Trapp had retired from the New York City Transit Authority in 1976 where she had served as Secretary to the Comptroller.
As a proud member of DC 37 and a Union shop steward, Mrs. Trapp provided key testimony in the Union’s successful effort to get the Department of Education to pay paraprofessionals on Brooklyn/Queens Day and to compensate them for previous unpaid work on those days, the subject of a full page column by Lillian Roberts, the executive director of the Union who called her “a living lesson for our younger members.”
Mrs. Trapp has been a Block Association president and a member of UCOBA, a group of area block associations in Community District 9. Just this year she received a Certificate of Appreciation via Shirley Patterson, 43rd Assembly District leader, on behalf of all elected officials, for her “dedicated service, diligence and unyielding support.”
She was honored by the City Council for her “dedication to our community” (Letitia James, Council Member – 35th District), by Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and received a Citation of Honor for being an “Extraordinary Elder” from the Office of Kings Country District Attorney Charles J. Hynes. She has been honored by the Crown Heights lions Club and the Brooklyn Old Timers Foundation, Inc.
Besides enjoying the company of her large family and many, many friends, Mrs. Trapp is a bowler and, for over SO years, has been a member of the Women’s International Bowling Congress. In 2009, she was recognized, in EI Paso, Texas for her 30 years of participation in the national tournaments.
She has been a member of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Brooklyn for 67 years, is a recipient of the Service to Church and Community Award from St. Matthew’s Deanery and of the Church’s highest honor for laity in a diocese, the Bishop’s Medal for Distinguished Parochial Service.
During this year and in 2011, there will be celebration of Mrs. Trapp’s Guinness World Record achievement.
