William Christopher Maloney

William “Bill” Maloney of Rockville Centre, N.Y, and Clarksburg. Md., died Thursday, November 24, at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, after a short illness.

He was born in 1959 in Rockville Centre on Long Island to John and Marie Maloney. He attended local schools, graduating from St. Agnes Cathedral High School in 1977. He studied physics at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y. and New Mexico State University.

After a brief stint in the 1980s working for a private company on the development of magnetic resonance imaging machines, Bill joined the public service ranks by accepting a position with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, where he held many roles related to medical product safety, especially imaging technologies.

As a young teenager in 1972 , Maloney became captivated by the legendary chess championship match between the American Bobby Fischer and the Russian Boris Spassky. A life-long passion for the game ensued, and Bill played chess online and with friends. An aficionado of military history from the Civil War through World War II, Bill was very proud of his father’s participation in the D-Day landings on Omaha Beach on June 4, 1944. In addition, he maintained a deep appreciation of space exploration (both real and imagined). He was an avid follower of the ongoing efforts of NASA as well as a lifelong fan of Star Trek in all its incarnations. Also among Bill’s wide-ranging and diverse interests were cooking and food, and he enjoyed watching documentaries about the varieties of ethnic cuisine.

Bill split his time between his house in Maryland and his boyhood home in New York, maintaining warm friendships in both locales.

He is survived by his many cousins and his grateful friends and professional colleagues who treasured his gentle spirit, his steadfast loyalty, his limitless curiosity, his ever-present sense of humor and all of the other qualities that made Bill such a unique individual. He will be greatly missed.

A Mass will be offered in his memory at St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic Church in Oceanside, NY and his ashes will be scattered on Long Island in the spring. Donations may be made in his honor to the World War II Museum in New Orleans, La. in which Bill was a charter member, and the U.S. Chess Trust, a not-for-profit organization devoted to the promotion of chess as a means of intellectual development.