Joseph Edward Maday Jr., 83

He was either repairing a car, a boat or making a piece of furniture, and all the while Joseph Edward Maday Jr. included his family in everything.
“What I remember most was he always did everything with us,” said son Edward Maday, who was helped by his father in making his first violin and has continued that vocation working in one half of what was his father’s workshop. In the other half, Edward’s wife, Janet, gives cello lessons. “We were fishing crabbing, I had my own boat when I was 13-years-old and I am a woodworker because of my father.”
Maday died at Glens Falls Hospital in upstate Glens Falls on Feb. 16. He was 83.
Born on June 15, 1930 in New Rochelle to Joseph Edward and Jenny (née Beaumont) Maday, now deceased, his parents moved to Woodmere from Brooklyn in the late 1930s, according to another son, Joseph Maday III, who lives in Valley Stream with his wife, Christine.
“He was a hard worker, a good family guy and a good friend,” said Joseph, who remembered being at the Woodmere firehouse many times and sitting on the pool table as his dad was, for many years, a volunteer firefighter.

Maday was a car mechanic and owned Steve’s Collision on Broadway in Woodmere from 1953 to 1997. He married Margaret “Peggy Olson on April 29, 1951. They retired to upstate New York in 1998. He was a devoted member of St. Isaac Jogues – St. John the Baptist R.C. Church in Chestertown.
On his business’s website, Edward called his father a “master woodworker and mechanic” and wrote, “Early on he gave me the skills I would need to make my first violin at age fifteen.”
“He made furniture in our house, built boats, he could do everything,” said Edward who lives in the family house his mother and his father had built right next to the home where Maday grew up. “He showed me how to plane wood, work the tools. Building the violin is not something that just happened, he helped.”
Edward remembers his father restoring an old army jeep, fixing an old inboard motorboat from 1939. “My brother Johnny and I watched them fit the valves and the pistons,” he said. “My father was always making something, there were tools, wood and car parts, a friend called us ‘the construction family.’ Dad was always doing something, he never stopped.”
Maday is also survived by sons John (Pam) of Chestertown, James Maday and Albert (Cristy), of Adirondack, daughter Jane Maday of Chestertown, grandchildren Sandra, Jessamyn, Katherine, Karalyn, Charlene, John, Cassandra, Elizabeth, Edward, Albert and Joseph, and great-granddaughters Piper and Pia. He was predeceased by two sisters, Irene Korshin and Emilie Seeley.
A mass of Christian burial was celebrated at Isaac Jogues – St. John the Baptist R.C. Church on Feb. 22. He will be interred at Adirondack Cemetery in the spring.
Contributions can be made in his honor to the North Warren Emergency Squad, P.O. Box 323, Chestertown, NY 12817.