And one night in 1968, when friends reminded him of his lifelong dream of running in the Boston Marathon, he decided it was time.
"That particular evening, it just set me off," he said. "In fact, that's sort of the way I react about a lot of things - spontaneity is kind of nice to have in your life, you know?"
Maloney, 78, said that as a child, he cheered on runners and passed out oranges when the Marathon course looped close to West Newton.
"I always had it in the back of my mind that I'd like to run, just one of those little fantasies kids have, never really expecting that I would," he said.
Though Maloney became a veteran of three Marathons and many local shorter races, he was 39 years old and had little running experience when he first answered the challenge.
Never mind he only had a month and a half to train.
But that next day he headed down to The Sports Club on Main Street and bought himself a pair of running shoes (he still has the receipt for $5.95).
A resident of the hilly Summit Street, he found his best training right in his own backyard.
"I just figured, here, we have a nice hill, Prospect Hill," he said. "I'm going to make it a point to go up and down it as many times as I can. If I can get so I can run fast up and down that hill, that will help me in this long stretch I've got to go."
He also developed a schedule for longer runs through the surrounding towns.
The training required strict discipline, particularly in inclement weather, and scheduling around his job working for the information systems division of Raytheon in Sudbury. And family - his wife, Barbara, and five children - stuck by him.
"My wife was very supportive," he said. "I was very pleased, because (for awhile) I felt like she was going to be a widow."
But soon, he said, persistence won out. "And so once I got running, after I ran for about a mile or two, it's almost like you have a second wind," he explained.
"Your body starts to relax and starts to get in the rhythm of the thing ... instead of gasping for breath, you're breathing fairly well. That always amazed me. You shift gears, you really do."
Once at that threshold, he worked up to what he called a good pace: 10 miles in 65 minutes. By a week or two before the Marathon, he was running the 15 miles to Maynard.
He got up early the day of the race, and recounted his experience at the starting line: Conditions were warm and sunny, which made for tough going.
The first portion of the race went very smoothly, he said, but then he was "really dragging."
"Any thought of coming in with a good time was out of the question, if I could just make it."
The hot weather had left him with sunburn on the backs of his legs and massive blisters on the bottoms of his feet.
"I was actually limping the last five miles, but I said, I'll be damned, if I've come this far, I'm not going to quit," he recalled.
And he finally did make it across the finish line.
"I was very excited," he said. "I said, God, I made it. I had a lot of doubts. And more and more as I got closer to the finish line, I'll tell you."
After the finish, Maloney and the other finishers joined the top runners for a meal of beef stew (he still has the meal ticket). He speaks fondly of top finishers in the race: the slight John J. Kelley, who handily kept up with younger and bigger runners, and then-Wesleyan student Ambrose Burfoot, who finished first in the race.
But he hadn't quenched his thirst for running yet. After a summer of local 10-mile runs, he ran the next year's Marathon, in which he shaved an hour off his time to complete the race in about three and a half hours.
The 1970 Marathon, however, he called a "disaster," as frigid temperatures and driving rain forced him to drop out after the 20-mile marker, bleeding from the chest from the air's friction.
He then decided to scale back.
"After that loss at the Marathon, I said maybe this is a little too much for me," he said. "I'm getting older, I don't want to push my luck."
Maloney and his wife remain very active, however. "The minute the weather is fairly decent, we start going down (to the track) every day and put in an hour," he said. "You feel kind of exhilarated after an hour's walk, and we move right along."
Maloney hasn't decided if he'll come out to see the race today, but he has turned out to cheer for the runners in previous years.
Much has changed and much has stayed the same about the event, he said. The 1968 Marathon was mostly local - and women weren't allowed.
He recalled one story of a Californian who was barred from qualifying, but determined to run anyway. Despite support from the crowd, an official tried to drag her off the course.
"She was too fast for him," Maloney recalled. "Some of the spectators grabbed him and pushed him back. He wasn't a good guy, I'll tell you."
But the same sense of camaraderie and energy is still a constant, he said.
"The funny thing is you get to see people from very interesting parts of life, they're a little bit of everything," he said. "They're teachers, they're doctors, they're lawyers, they're plumbers, they're carpenters, they're every range of person you can think of. I can't think of any other particular event where you do that."
