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Rockville Center Band to present award to director John E. Mahoney

Music Scene: June 21, 2007

The Rockville Centre Concert Band will present a special citation to its director emeritus, John E. (Ned) Mahoney, during a free outdoor concert on Friday, June 22, in Port Washington.

In Mahoney's honor, the band will play "The Three Bluejackets," which was composed by Ernest Williams in 1942 for Mahoney and two fellow Navy cornet players, Leonard Smith and Frank Elsass.

Mahoney, 95, is to receive the American Bandmasters Association's Edwin Franko Goldman Memorial Citation.

"It's a big deal," said Raoul F. Camus, the band's current conductor. "We are being honored to be the ones to give him the award."

Mahoney, who arrived in New York from Michigan in 1931 to study cornet, began his professional career as cornet soloist with the 69th and 7th Regiment Bands of New York. He served in the Navy from 1942 to 1945.

Before that, in 1937, he had joined the Goldman Band and, with Smith and Elsass, formed the Goldman Cornet Trio, a popular group also known as The Three Aces. He played 25 seasons in Manhattan's Central Park and Brooklyn's Prospect Park.

Mahoney, who lives in Valley Stream, had an active career on Long Island. He organized and conducted the Babylon High School band from 1937 to 1941 and taught many private brass students. In 1942, he married Anne E. Hubbs of Rockville Centre, and they had three children. After his Navy service, he founded Ned Mahoney Music, a music store serving Long Island public schools for 56 years. He retired from that at age 90.

Mahoney was also bandmaster of the Freeport Fire Department Band, the predecessor of the Rockville Centre Concert Band, from 1973 to 1976, and spent 60 years with the Kismet Temple Shrine Band, retiring in 1988 to become its bandmaster emeritus.

The free outdoor concert, titled "Great Rivers and the Open Seas," begins at 8:15 p.m. at the John Philip Sousa Band Shell in Sunset Park, Main Street, Port Washington. The rest of the program, says band secretary and flute/piccolo player Sandra A. Vigliotti, includes such favorites as selections from the musical "South Pacific" and "Showboat," "The Blue Danube Waltz" and "The Stars and Stripes Forever."

-- Aileen Jacobson