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.