Westbay Community Action and the Warwick Boys and Girls Clubs ensured a plentiful Thanksgiving for hundreds of families Saturday as they distributed food from Westbay offices on Jefferson Boulevard and the club’s Norwood clubhouse.

Westbay, with the assistance of the Scituate Lions Club plus more than a dozen volunteers, handed out pies and the fixings for a Thanksgiving dinner as drivers circled the parking lot without leaving their vehicles. The heavy press came in mid-morning just as the rain picked up. That neither slowed the volunteers nor the recipients. Inside the Westbay Marketplace, crews replenished shelves with canned and dried goods.

As Desarie Prestly, family support supervisor, explained most of the food distributed came from the 12,000 pounds collected earlier this month in the Warwick Scouting for Food drive conducted by the Boy Scouts. She said Blue Cross Blue Shield provided gift cards to buy turkeys. In total she estimated between those making pickups Saturday and the remainder of this week, they would hand out 580 bags. Recipients who had applied for assistance were checked off from a master list although, as Joslyn Groves, who oversaw the operation said, “nobody gets turned away.”

As the Westbay operation slowed, the scene at the Boys and Girls Club came to life. Pickup trucks driven by board members and volunteers pulled in with  boxes of frozen turkeys. Meanwhile, a club van backed to an open front door where volunteers pulled out boxes of canned corn, beans, gravy and cranberry sauce. In addition there were dried potatoes and boxes of stuffing.

All the goods, turkeys and shopping bags included,  were donated by Stop & Shop. There was enough for 200 bags. Lara D’Antuono, executive director of the clubs said Stop & Shop has been providing the Thanksgiving meals  for as long as she can remember. Stop & Shop did the same for all six of the state’s Boys and Girls Clubs.

Once the turkeys as hard as rocks were  freed from their boxes and piled on the sidewalk, the full crew went to work filling bags with the fixings where it was warmer and free from the last of the rain. Then as recipients started showing up, volunteers shifted to placing bags and turkeys in the back seats and trunks of recipients.