Why a Rumford man has spent 30 years fixing up and giving away band instruments to kids

EAST PROVIDENCE – "I want your old band instruments," states the sign in front of an unassuming ranch house in suburban Rumford. "Any condition, including parts."

Inside, Gaston Malloy has spent the last 30 years fixing up instruments and giving them to area kids whose parents otherwise couldn't afford them.

His phone routinely rings with people eager to unload trumpets, trombones, saxophones, bassoons, clarinets, flutes, drums and much more. Down in the finished basement, Malloy meticulously repairs any damage and polishes the instruments so they look brand new.

Then he waits for the calls that inevitably come in from parents who are struggling to pay for a piccolo or an oboe. He estimates that he gave away 26 clarinets in the last four months alone, in addition to a trumpet and a tenor saxophone.

"A lot of what I do," Malloy said, "is because of what I was exposed to when I was young. And what I wish I had."

Malloy grew up poor in a small town in segregated North Carolina, picking cotton alongside his parents and four siblings.

He joined his middle school's band in sixth grade, hoping to learn to play the trumpet. But there weren't enough to go around, so he wound up borrowing a taped-together trombone.

Against the odds, Malloy went on to have a successful, decades-long career playing and teaching music. And he's lost count of how many instruments he's fixed up and given to students who otherwise couldn't afford them.

Chasing a dream out of the rural South

Born in 1946, Malloy grew up in Laurinberg, North Carolina, a rural town of about 8,000 people near the South Carolina border. His family's home was a shack so rundown that he was embarrassed to bring friends over.

His mother worked in a floral shop. His father, who died when he was 14, helped build interstate highways under the Eisenhower administration. Starting around junior high school, Malloy began picking cotton to help his family scrape by.

He attended all-Black schools where, he said, "we got the short end of the stick." After graduating in 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act passed, he escaped the South by enlisting in the Navy.

As a dental technician on a ship based out of Newport, Malloy traveled as far as Italy and Holland and formed a band that performed every time they returned to port. After getting out, he hoped to become a full-fledged dentist.

But, he said, "I couldn't afford to go to Tufts."

Instead, Malloy found a job teaching music at Walpole High School outside Boston and supplemented that income by performing gigs at night. Despite learning to play on a busted-up trombone, he had fallen in love with music back in middle school, when he dreamed of being like jazz performer J. J. Johnson.

In the 1990s, Malloy became the band director at Riverside Junior High, where he began hearing from single parents who wanted their kids to join the program but couldn't afford an instrument. He started looking for old, run-down ones that he could fix up and hand out.

One young girl who received a piccolo from him ended up becoming one of the top-seated flute players in Rhode Island, he said.

"See, the thing that excites me is the fact that I can look and say, 'This child did this. And they did it only because it was made available to them,'" Malloy said. "Because I didn't have that available to me."

Learning to repair instruments allowed music director to give back

Early in his career, Malloy had grown tired of waiting two weeks to a month for his instruments to be repaired, and he took courses through Villanova University so that he could learn do the work himself.

Those skills continued to come in handy as he became the music director at East Providence High School, then the band director at Seekonk High School in Massachusetts, and a substitute music teacher at Smithfield High School after he'd officially retired.

Often, he gave the instruments that he fixed up to needy students. But word spread, and soon families from other districts were calling, too.

Malloy is happy to give a refurbished instrument to any child who needs one – practically no questions asked. His one requirement: Writing a thank-you note to the donor who gave him the instrument for free.

In some cases, Malloy will pay a reasonable fee – say, $100 – to buy a secondhand instrument. He'll then ask the recipient's family to help cover that cost, though he doesn't charge for his own time and labor. Compared with spending more than $1,000 over time to rent the same instrument from a music store, it's a steep discount.

'A wonderful run'

Malloy's home in Rumford is full of plaques, teaching awards and letters from grateful students, telling him that he changed their lives. One student even asked him, years later, to officiate at her wedding.

John Smialek, who succeeded Malloy as the band director at Seekonk High School, recalled that Malloy grew the program from a dozen students to about 75 over the course of three years.

"The kids just loved him," Smialek said. "The hardest thing is to recruit kids to the band program, but this man could sell it to the kids."

While teaching, Malloy somehow managed to simultaneously earn a bachelor's degree from Rhode Island College and work toward a master's degree. He also formed a six-piece band, Malloi – the name is spelled differently from his last name for tax reasons, he said – which performed at weddings, banquets and other private function for more than 30 years.

The band won a "Best of Rhode Island" award in 2014 but broke up after most events came to a halt during the pandemic, Malloy said.

"We had a wonderful, wonderful run," he said. "This was the excitement of my life."

Smialek said that Malloy's musical talents, and his clear passion, were among the main things that motivated Seekonk students to join the high school's band. The other was Malloy's kind-hearted and easygoing personality.

"He just really cared about everybody," Smialek said. "I don't think he ever got mad."

Today, Malloy mainly keeps busy by teaching private music lessons. Two tall shelving units in his basement are stacked with instruments that he's repaired and carefully tucked away in their cases, ready to be given to the next child who needs one.

"All you've got to do is make a phone call," he said.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Why musician Gaston Malloy of Rumford wants your old band instruments