Margaret Hirsch

Margaret was born on July 22, 1918 to Caroline Barba and Vincent Mongul in New York City. Vincent was a barber of Italian background. Caroline’s family was Italian and German. They lived on the West Side of Manhattan in the midtown area, where Margaret was baptized at St. Ambrose Roman Catholic Church. Margaret never knew her father, Vincent, who died in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.

By the time Margaret was two years old, her mother had remarried William Gallagher and her first sister, Catherine, was born. Caroline and William had five more children—Veronica, Eleanor, William, Lorraine, and Kenneth. Margaret was the big sister who helped take care of them all.

The family had more than its share of hardships. They were poor, and Margaret remembered going to elementary school hungry in the early 1920s. Two of her siblings, Eleanor and William, died in childhood. Margaret herself survived diphtheria at age five and blood poisoning several years later.

But Margaret’s childhood also had a share of fun. She played in the parks with her sisters Catherine and Veronica and a friend, Susie Garvey. It was a big city childhood, and one of their favorite activities was walking over to nearby Broadway to see the stars, like Fred and Adele Astaire, exiting the stage doors. Margaret was, by her own admission, something of a chatterbox in school, enraging one nun so much that she threw an ink bottle at her. Margaret ducked, and it hit the girl seated behind her!

Margaret was very close to her mother’s mother, Caroline Kolias, and her husband Anthony Kolias. She lived with them for six months when battling blood poisoning, and they provided a loving home to her during her high school years. She remained with them until her marriage and learned from their example of hard work and saving.

Margaret graduated elementary school, Holy Cross Center, in 1932. She took an unusual step and did not go to the local Catholic high school. Rather she chose to go downtown to Washington Irving High School, from which she graduated in January 1937. Her Uncle Jimmy encouraged her to go to college, but she felt she needed to support herself to help the family during the depression.

Work took her further out of the neighborhood. She found office jobs, usually typing, at several companies including Crum and Forster where she met Jack (John F. Hirsch 3rd), who became her husband in 1940. Jack spied her in the typing pool and would come and stare at her until he got the courage to ask her out. Their first date was to dinner and Radio City Music Hall, which probably cost him a week’s pay. He visited often at her grandparents’ house, where Carrie, who was an excellent cook, made platters of eggplant about which they raved for years. They married after a brief courtship and lived for a year in Greenwich Village. Then they moved to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

Margaret was required to leave Crum and Forster when she married, and during World War II she worked for City Service Oil Company at the Brooklyn Army Depot, again typing. The typists frequently stayed until midnight to get out orders for oil and gas, and Margaret often walked home. Brooklyn was safe enough then to do so.

In 1944 as the war was ending Margaret and Jack decided they were ready for children. Their daughter Susan was born in 1945, and Barbara arrived in 1948. Margaret was a stay-at-home Mom, who enjoyed cooking tremendously. She couldn’t boil water when she married but she taught herself to become terrific chef. She was also a fine seamstress, again self-taught, and she made many clothes for her children as well as curtains and slipcovers. She had a great enthusiasm for new experiences, and Jack, who grew up in the suburbs--hunting, fishing, swimming, and taking part in myriad sports--introduced her to many of his activities. The young family often went to the beach, and Margaret learned to swim and to fish while helping Jack teach those skills to their daughters. Although she’d never been camping, when Susan and Barbara became Girl Scouts, she got involved too. Indeed she became a Brownie troop leader, and besides teaching her troop crafts took them on overnights and cookouts.

While Margaret came to love the outdoors, she had always had a love of beauty, and especially of music. She was part of the Swing generation and saw Bennie Goodman and Frank Sinatra at the Paramount Theater in New York. She had a lovely voice and sang in the house all the time. She also loved opera and listened on the radio. She and Jack took Susan and Barbara to art museums and the ballet. The latter was Margaret’s idea, but Jack learned to like it too. This spurred dreams of becoming dancers in her daughters, and Margaret took them to lessons for years.

When Susan went to college, Margaret went back to work for four years, as a receptionist for Chase Bank in Manhattan. After Barbara went off to college, Margaret and Jack moved to Manhattan again. It was easier for her to enjoy the art museums and concerts she loved. She often went with an old friend from Brooklyn, Luba Goldberg, who had also moved to Manhattan. She and Jack took vacations in Newfoundland, Canada for salmon fishing with Jack’s business associates.

When Jack retired in 1974, Margaret and he moved to his deceased parents’ house in Spring Lake Heights on the Jersey Shore. There Margaret had a whole new way of life in a small beach community. She became an avid vegetable gardener and expanded her cooking skills, inspired by Julia Child and other great chefs. She and Jack also had more time for the beach and fishing which they had enjoyed together.

It was in retirement that Margaret could again expand her horizons, this time as she and Jack did the traveling they had dreamed of for years. They took several driving trips out west to see the national parks and a tour to Hawaii. They also began to travel abroad. Their first trip was to Mexico with friends, and then they took tours to Western Europe, Britain and Ireland, Egypt and East Africa (Kenya), and the Greek Islands. When Barbara moved to California, they visited several times, seeing different parts of the state.

An important new role for Margaret was that of grandmother to Jesse and Joanna, the children of Susan and her husband Lew Erenberg. When Jack died in 1986, Margaret moved to Evanston to be near Jesse and Joanna. She was a hands-on grandmother, and loved caring for them and taking them places. She also continued to enjoy the art museums and concerts, of Chicago this time rather than New York.

But the Chicago winters were very hard, and Margaret spent three of them in warmer climes, first in Sarasota, Florida, then in San Diego, and finally in Palm Springs with Barbara. Barbara joined her on a cruise to Alaska after Jack died, and then she took more tours outside the U. S. by herself. Margaret crossed Canada by train through the Rockies to Vancouver. She toured Spain and Portugal on the way to visit Susan, Lew, and her grandchildren in Munich for several weeks in 1991. Another time she toured Scandinavia, particularly enjoying cruising Norway’s fjords. Margaret’s last tour was a month-long one to Fiji, New Zealand and Australia. But half way through she fell and broke a shoulder in Tasmania. Yet three years later, at the age of 82, she flew by herself to Munich again to visit with Susan and Lew. They motored through Austria and the Czech Republic.

At the age of 88 Margaret moved into assisted living at the Presbyterian Homes in Evanston. She remained active, going on excursions with her new neighbors, as well as traveling east for her 90th birthday party with her extended family at the home of her niece Genie and her husband Bud. Several months after her 91st birthday, Margaret suffered a small stroke that led to great physical weakness. Although she regained some mobility, she often needed a wheelchair. A year later Margaret moved to Sunrise of Lincoln Park, where she died from congestive heart failure and lung disease on May 29, 2011.