The oldest running show in Westbury sets up again this week. The Maria SS. Dell'Assunta Society's Feast of the Assumption, the 115th edition, runs Wednesday, August 12 through Saturday, August 15 in the St. Brigid and Our Lady of Hope parking field at 101 Maple Avenue, with food, games and music from 6 to 11 each night.

Saturday is the day with the weight on it. August 15 is the actual Feast of the Assumption on the Catholic calendar, and the Society marks it the way it has since the beginning: a 5 p.m. Mass at St. Brigid's Church on Post Avenue, and the procession with the statue of the Blessed Mother through the village streets to the feast grounds, where the final night runs to 11.

1910: a band, a pickup truck and a route through the village

The origin story, which the Society tells in its own published history, is better than most founding legends because it is so specific. In 1910, Italian immigrants who had settled in Westbury from villages around Naples, Durazzano and Saviano among them, wanted a feast like the ones at home. Each group wanted to honor its own village's patron saint, and nobody would budge. The pastor of St. Brigid's, Father McGinnis, broke the tie by suggesting they honor the Blessed Mother instead, a devotion none of them could rank behind their own.

The organizers collected nickels and dimes through the Italian neighborhoods to pay for a band, fireworks and a statue. On the evening of August 14, 1910, they walked a route up Union Avenue to New Cassel and back along Maple and Post with a band and a pickup truck, and along the way people handed over homemade wine, pasta, chickens, rabbits and garden vegetables, all of it auctioned at the feast the next day. On August 15 they walked the route again carrying the statue, and residents bid money for the honor of carrying it, the size of the donation deciding how long you got to hold it up.

The year the village said no

The feast has run through two world wars and a century of Westbury reinventing itself, but only once did it nearly not happen. In 1942, with the United States at war with Italy, the Society was denied permission to process through the village streets. The members took the position that the feast was a religious observance and not a national one, and found the loophole that settled it: nobody could keep them off the sidewalks. The statue of the Blessed Mother went through Westbury that August anyway, single file along the sidewalk, banners and all, to a Mass at St. Brigid's. The following year the ban was gone and the procession went back to the street, where it has stayed.

The statue itself has a history of accommodations. It proved so heavy that in 1946 the Society moved it to a motorized float, then to a hand-pushed one, and since 1979 the compromise has been to push it part of the route and carry it the rest, shoulder-high, the way it started.

A mutual aid society that outlived the need for one

The feast came first and the institution followed. The Society was founded on July 11, 1911, when the feast's organizers met at the home of Nicola Piscitelli, who became its first president, to form a mutual aid society, the standard immigrant machinery of the era for burying members, supporting widows and lending money that banks would not. The Ladies Auxiliary followed in 1933 and was formally merged into the Society in 1998.

More than a century on, the mutual aid function has been replaced by a charitable one. The Society's own accounting lists decades of support for St. Brigid's parish and school scholarships, along with village causes from the Westbury Neighborhood House to senior citizens' programs. The feast is the engine that pays for it, which is a reason beyond the sausage and peppers to spend a summer evening in a church parking lot.

If you go

The feast grounds are at 101 Maple Avenue in Westbury, in the parking field shared by St. Brigid and Our Lady of Hope. Hours are 6 to 11 p.m. Wednesday, August 12 through Saturday, August 15. Saturday's Mass is at 5 p.m. at St. Brigid's Church, 75 Post Avenue, with the procession following. It is a church-lot feast in the classic mold, food stands, games, live music, and it is the kind of thing Long Island still does well precisely because the people running it are volunteers whose grandparents ran it before them.

One hundred and fifteen editions in, the Dell'Assunta feast has outlasted the railroad-avenue Westbury it was born in, a wartime ban, and every fashion in how Long Islanders spend an August night. Whatever else is on this week, it has earned the visit.