PATRICK CONWAY
“Don’t worry, Mother,” said fifteen-year old Patrick Conway. “I’ll go to work at the carriage factory and make some money for you.”
Patrick’s father, Martin Conway, had just died, leaving five children and no money. There had never been much money in the Conway home and Patrick had never known his father to be well. Martin Conway while living in Ireland, had served in the British army and had been wounded at Sebastopol during the Crimean War. In 1863 he had brought his wife and baby girl to America, the land of his dreams. He proved his loyalty to his new country by joining the Navy and fighting in the Civil War. Tuberculosis developed and finally caused his death.
Patrick was born July 4, 1865 in Troy, New York. His life, even as a child, was not a carefree one in this home where there was both poverty and illness.
At the time of his father’s death Patrick was an honor student at Homer Academy in Homer, New York, where the family had moved. He willingly gave up his school work for a while in order to help the family. Three of the children were ill with tuberculosis and died within a few years after their father’s death.
Little did Patrick know that he would find his job at the carriage factory a dual one. When Charlie Bates, one of the workers who led the Homer Band learned of Patsy’s interest in the cornet, he said, “So you would like to play the cornet? If you will come to my house after work I’ll give you lessons.... Maybe you can be in the band some day.”
So Patrick worked all day learning the trade of carriage trimming, and walked six miles every evening to take his lessons. But that never seemed to tire him.
Later he joined the band and returned to school for part time work. After he was graduated from Homer Academy at the age of eighteen, he began playing with “Happy Bill Daniel’s Country Band Orchestra” where he gained valuable experience. This proved to be the beginning of his career as a bandsman.
But he needed money to help the family and to continue his studies in music. As soon as he had accumulated enough cash he bought a small cigar factory, which was soon a thriving little business. He left the making of fine cigars and the management of the factory to his brother Martin, so that he could devote his time to his music and study. He enrolled at Ithaca Conservatory of Music and at Cornell University.
“Patsy” continued his band work along with his college work. While he was playing for dances at the old Glen Haven Hotel, he met pretty Alice Randall. He decided at once, “That is the girl I am going to marry.”
After their marriage they lived in Courtland, New York, where their son Paul was born. Then they moved to Ithaca in 1895 when Patrick accepted an offer to teach music at Cornell University. He organized the Cornell Cadet Band and directed it for thirteen years.
Meantime about 1900, the city of Ithaca asked Patrick to start a city band. With the financial backing of Ebenezer Treman, one of the civic minded, wealthy merchants of the town, Patrick was able to bring some of the finest musicians in the world to Ithaca. Some of these musicians took their families and lived there, playing in the old Lyceum Theater Orchestra during the winter season when the band was not on tour.
This band played in practically every music and amusement center in the country. They went on many tours such as: the Buffalo Exposition; the St. Louis World’s Fair; the Cincinnati Zoo; Riverview park, Chicago; the Corn palace at Mitchell, South Dakota; and state fairs in the western states.
About 1904 Patrick’s engagements at Willow Grove Park, a popular resort near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and at Young’s Pier at Atlantic City, New Jersey began. These continued for many years.
In 1908 Patrick took over the Ithaca Band and gave it the name, “Patrick Conway and his Band.” People who had never heard of Ithaca began to hear about the band which took prizes at concerts given in various cities of the East. An old Ithacan used to reminisce, “Some bands wouldn’t even enter if they knew ‘Patsy’ and his bunch of terrors had.”
The next move was to Syracuse, New York. By that time Conway was making transcontinental tours with fifty or sixty men in the band as well as a dozen fine soloists.
In 1915 he played a long engagement at the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. His friend Sousa was there at the same time, and on one occasion they each conducted part of a great concert in which both bands were massed.
In Syracuse during the winter months Conway organized and conducted the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra as well as a theater orchestra. He also did some composing but published only one march. His band made a number of records for Victor.
During World War I Patrick Conway was commissioned as Captain in the U. S. Army Air Force and sent to Waco, Texas to establish the first Air Force Band. At the same time Sousa was starting the Navy Band at Great Lakes Training Station.
Sorrow came into Patrick and Alice Conway’s lives when their son Paul died at the age of twenty-six. Paul, a pianist of great promise, had also played an instrument in his father’s band until his health failed following an accident when he was eighteen.
The family moved back to Ithaca in 1922. Patrick was made dean of the Conway Band School which was affiliated with the Ithaca Conservatory of Music. During the school year he trained a remarkably fine student band. He took a number of these boys with the big band on the summer tours. How the boys worked for that privilege!
During the winter he went into New York to hear good music and to broadcast on the General Motors Family Hour with Mary Garden, Nora Bayes, and other celebrities. He organized and rehearsed amateur symphony orchestras made up of business and professional men and women in several small cities of New York.
Bandmaster Patrick Conway, like his Irish friends, Patrick Gilmore and Victor Herbert, had two gifts often said to be peculiar to their nationality—the gift of music and the gift of making friends. But Patrick Conway had still another rare gift—that of inspiring his students with his own ideals. Countless young men turned to musical careers after finding a master teacher and a loyal friend in “Patsy” as they affectionately called him.
Conway was a striking figure as he directed his boys in almost faultless renditions of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Greig, Debussy and other great composers. The simplicity that characterized him was evident in his manner of conducting. He believed, “The conductor’s motions are intended as signs and suggestions to his musicians—nothing more. He doesn’t need to do a thing to entertain his audience. His band is there for that purpose, and the more he devotes himself to directing, the better the band will succeed in its purpose.”
A Conway band was equally at home with military selections and popular music. No leader of that day knew better how to make programs that the public wanted and yet make them like only the best.
If Conway had any leisure time, he knew what to do with it. Reading or hiking with one of his dogs as a companion were popular pastimes. He collected authentic stories about early days in the West.
His favorite sports were boxing and baseball. Each year at the opening game at the New York Polo Grounds he took a small band to play for his old friend, John J. (Muggsie) McGraw.
Patrick Conway died at Ithaca, June 10, 1929, at the height of his usefulness. At the time of his death the Ithaca Journal News paid the following tribute: “It is no small thing to have gladdened the hearts of the people, to have lifted them repeatedly above the mundane and trivial, to have made them forget the heat of the working day in the exaltation of good music. This was Patrick Conway’s contribution to his time, and for it he has earned the heartfelt gratitude of more than one generation. His own tradition of uncompromising musicianship, his belief in offering the best to popular audiences will be carried on by those who have learned from him.”
