Rockville Centre St. Patrick's Parade returns for first time in three years

For the first time in three years, “the Parade that Shares and Cares” is set to return to the streets of Rockville Centre.

In the lead up to the long-awaited return of the St. Patrick’s Parade this Saturday, the Parade Committee spent the first couple of weeks of March getting reacquainted with the community through several fundraisers in the village. The last event before the parade is Friday night’s Grand Marshal Dinner.

Another major event was the tree lighting on March 10 outside Village Hall.

“It’s remarkable, the community support and the extended committee member support, and we needed that in order to get these things put together,” Parade Committee board member Anne Travers said at the lighting. “We took months-long events and crushed them into a third of the time.”

At the tree lighting, committee members joked that they thought Ellen White would be grand marshal for life. White was originally selected before the March 2020 parade, which was lost to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Last year’s event had to be modified, and focused on supporting local businesses as Covid-19 raged on.

White is the co-owner of the Backyard Players, an arts-based community program for teens and young adults with disabilities, which opened a new storefront on Long Beach Road last October.

Last Sunday, the committee hosted its annual C.J.’s Breakfast Fundraiser at the locally famous café on Long Beach Road. There it sold shirts commemorating the 25th edition of the parade.

As regulations have changed with Covid numbers declining, the committee moved quickly to bring back in-person fundraising efforts like the Taste of Rockville Centre, which featured food from local eateries.

Last year, the parade was transformed into a virtual fundraiser. Dubbed the March for Small Business, it attracted more than $40,000 in donations — almost double the original goal — which went to three small businesses and 10 small business employees in a trying year for commerce.

One fixture that will be missing from this year’s parade is beloved former committee President Andrew Healey, who died in January at 68. “Andy meant a lot to me, personally,” committee treasurer Kevin Lombardi said. “I always looked at him as an inspiration, and while it always is sad to think that he’s not here with us, he’s certainly looking down, smiling.”

Lombardi credited Healey for helping the committee get creative with the event amid the challenges of the past two years.

Parade committee Vice President Jackie Kerr said that the board and community would feel Healey’s presence most at the Mass at St. Agnes Cathedral, which will start at 9 a.m. on Saturday.

Since its inception in 1997, the parade has distributed more than $1.2 million in donations to 67 different charities. This year the committee is returning to its traditional method of giving to three causes: a local charity, the RVC Breast Cancer Coalition; a national organization, the Army Rangers Lead the Way Fund; and an Irish foundation, the Holy Family School for the Deaf in Cabra, Ireland.

Parade board member Pat McGuire said that many of his colleagues have seen for themselves how much the parade means to the charities receiving donations. The Backyard Players received funding from the 2017 parade, which, White said, she was grateful for.

“It completely changed our whole organization,” she said. “Besides the monetary support, it kind of put us on the map, and people knew who we were after the parade.”