Carrying on tradition of St. Rocco feast

For many decades, interrupted in the 1940s for a world war and last year for a pastor's illness, Glen Cove's Church of St. Rocco has held a public feast and the women have always been there to run it.

When their parents built the church in 1937, donating the land and their skills as stonemasons and carpenters, they were little girls who helped with the cleanup. Later they cooked and cleaned and walked in the procession when the men carried the saint's statue down the streets to bless the homebound. They made the meatballs and chicken cutlets and pastries, selling them to raise money for the parish hall, the food pantry, the boiler, the church's outreach.

"A few of us girls from the neighborhood, we used to bring hot water from home in buckets to wash the floor of the chapel," said Kathryn Grella, 93, taking a break from preparing salads in the parish hall kitchen Saturday, the six-day feast's penultimate day. "All of those services -- it was all volunteers."

Laura DiLeo, 89, remembered her first job at the feast, turning a giant wheel used to pick numbers for games of chance. "I'm short, and I was jumping up and down for two hours. I said, 'Next year, give me another job.' I worked the kitchen for 20 years, and I've been cashier for the last 15 years."

Many of the women are first-generation Americans; their parents had come to Glen Cove straight from Italy, or with a brief stopover in New York City.

"They wanted a church of their own, in their own language," Jean Visslailli, 91, said.

Since June, when the women began to prepare and freeze dishes with the help of retired professional chef Artur Gomes, they have made 130 trays of eggplant Parmesan, 4,300 meatballs, 600 pounds of chopped meat, 11 cases of broccoli rabe, 80 trays of shells and enough sauce to fill a swimming pool. By 10 p.m. Sunday, when the festival ends, the volunteers estimate they will have served more than 100,000 people.

"Our parish is one of working class families," said Reggie Spinello, the feast's chairman. "People give as much as they can, but . . . this is our biggest event."