From Helen Pike’s History & Heritage Journal:

We know who he was: George Howard Scott.

We know what he did: Was the first contracted musician to play the fabulous Kilgen theater organ installed in Convention Hall in 1931.

We also know G. Howard’s footprints vanished sometime in the mid-1950s.

What happened?

The query comes from his great-nephew, Tom Scott of Rochester, NY, who has done a yeoman’s job recreating the life of a man he grew up hearing about in stories.

“George’s step sister helped raise me,” he wrote in a recent e-mail. “She often spoke of our past relatives including ‘Howard’.  I knew from an early age that he played the organ in Asbury Park.”

Descending from grandparents who emigrated from Scotland and England, G. Howard and most of his extended family were musically inclined, most of them playing instruments of one kind or another.  “We always had a picture of Howard on the piano in our home as I do today,” Tom wrote.

Trained in a technique attributed to Theodore Leschetizky (which, in turn, has a genealogy all its own going back to Beethoven), G. Howard rode the circuit of secular music, securing various church and choir jobs in the greater New York area prior to World War II.

That this talented man from the farming community of Perry, NY, would wind up at the music capital of the Jersey Shore seemed predestined. Not only did Tom’s great-uncle give regular summertime concerts at Convention Hall, many of which were broadcast over WCAP, but he also performed in Walter Reade’s St. James Theatre on Cookman Avenue. With his second wife, Elizabeth, he also had a son here in 1932 who was named for him.

Then Tom, ever the determined genealogist, unearthed his military draft registration. In 1942 George was living with his then third wife, Helen M. Scott, at 1307 Fourth Ave., the heart of the city’s professional class.

In 1957 the 62-year-old George returned home to western New York State for his older brother’s funeral.

And that’s when the trail runs cold.

What happened?

Do you know?

Or, know someone who might have had music lessons from George or  Helen Scott? Or, been a Fourth Avenue neighbor?

Or who sang in a church choir with George at the organ?

Or, who has paid respects recently in an area cemetery, and noted a stone for  the city’s first municipal organist?

That would be a missing piece of Asbury Park’s history and heritage worth knowing.