We brought a container full of beach balls to National Night Out

National Night Out has been running since 1984. The idea started small — neighbors turning on their porch lights and sitting out front, so the block would know who lived on it. Four decades later it is held in more than 16,000 communities on the first Tuesday of August, and in Westbury it looks like this: a parade, a park, a police motorcycle escort, and a few thousand people who would otherwise be indoors.

The 2026 event was presented by Town Supervisor Jennifer DeSena and the Town Board, in partnership with Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman and the Nassau County Police Department. Parade assembly was 5 p.m. at the Salvation Army on Prospect Avenue. Festivities began at 6 p.m. at Martin “Bunky” Reid Park.

DPR has run yards in this village since 1994. Our trucks are on Hopper Street and Kinkel Street every working day, and the people at that park are the same people who wave those trucks through intersections all year. So we go.

The walk up Prospect

The parade stepped off behind Nassau County Police motorcycle units, followed by the Westbury High School NJROTC color guard and the campers from the Town of North Hempstead “Yes We Can” Community Center, who carried their own banner the whole way. It is about a ten-minute walk. It takes longer than that, because everybody stops.

What we brought

A scrap yard does not have an obvious booth. We are not handing out samples. What we do have is trucks, containers, and a decent sense of how to move a large quantity of something from one place to another.

So truck 62 pulled into the park with a roll-off container on the back, and inside it were [count — confirm] clear vinyl balls, each one filled with confetti and printed with the DPR mark. We put barricades around them and left them alone until six o'clock.

They did not last. Within a few minutes of the gates opening there was a ring of kids around the pen three deep, and inside of an hour the balls were spread across the entire field — on the slide line, at the ice cream truck, in the parking lot, going home under people's arms. Several adults left with one too, which we are choosing to take as a compliment.

At the table we also handed out drawstring bags, water bottles, mini soccer balls and shirts — the neon ones you could pick out from across the field for the rest of the night.

Why a scrap yard shows up

Recycling is the whole job here. Every load that comes through the gate on Hopper Street or Kinkel Street is material that would otherwise be buried — steel, copper, brass, aluminum, wire, appliances, cars. We have been pulling it back out of the waste stream in this village for over thirty years.

None of that is visible from the sidewalk. A night in the park is one of the few times a year the yard and the neighborhood are in the same place at the same time, so we treat it as the important date it is. Thanks to the Town of North Hempstead, the Nassau County Police Department, the Salvation Army Westbury Corps and everyone who walked up Prospect Avenue with us.

Next year: first Tuesday in August. Same park.