Married: Frances DeMarco (d. 1994), Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S.A., 1943.
Education:
Columbia University, New York
City College, New York
Pace College, New York
Career:
Served in the U.S. Navy in World War II
Subsequently worked as an accountant.
Other information:
Nephew John Tepper Marlin writes:
Herbert David Hirsch was born on June 1, 1917, the youngest child of Samuel Hirsch and Celia Moscowitz. His parents had moved from New York (where Ervin was born in 1909) to Syracuse, Rochester and Cincinnati (where Ruth was born), before settling a block east of Central Park on 107th Street, where Maurice was born in 1915.
Herbert did well at school (PS 38) and started studying advertising at Columbia. He switched to accounting at City College and then Pace College. He got his first job as a $12/week messenger for Daniel Moskow, his mother's brother, who hired many relatives in the Depression.
Herb took a pay cut, to $6/week, to become an accountant's assistant at Bayliss & Bayliss. He was promoted by joining CPA Henry Finkelstein. An audit assignment took Herb one fateful summer to Sayville's fancy Cedar Shore Hotel, where the Duchess of Windsor's mother was staying.
As young Herb Hirsch looked up from the columns of numbers on his lined paper, he had a vision of glamour that turned out to have a name - Frances DeMarco. Every surviving recommendation letter for Fran mentions how well she dressed. Truly, it was love at first sight. They spoke, but she left before he got her phone number. So he tracked her down like the junkyard-dog accountant that he was - calling every DeMarco in the Brooklyn phone book until he found her.
That impressed Fran. She was trained in business at a high school in Brooklyn and admired efficiency. She must have been efficient, because the project manager of the Manhattan Project (which was developing the atom bomb) made her his special assistant ... and she was subsequently hired away by General Groves of the United Mines Development Corporation (a uranium development subsidiary of Union Carbide).
War meant excitement for Fran and Herb. He joined the Navy in April 1942, and his accounting skills got him a quartermaster's spot. They exchanged 100 typed letters that show both his pride at having a girl friend back in the big city and her pride at having an active-duty sailor as her own pen pal. That his ship was on duty in Italy must have been a big plus in the DeMarco family. Fran and Herb married a year later, in 1943.
After World War II, Herb worked for the accounting firm of Warshaw & Clarke until 1949, when he created his own accounting firm. In 1945, Fran and Herb moved into her parents' large house at 14th St. and Ave. K. in Midwood, part of Flatbush, Brooklyn. They were active in the Midwood Civic Association led by Jim Terrey, a high school teacher.
In 1954, they purchased a lot in the Fort Salonga area of Northport, near the beach, and in 1960 they built a house on the lot. Tom and Marbeth Paulsen stayed there on their honeymoon, even before Herb and Fran moved in. John Marlin was introduced to Suffolk Co. for the first time when he visited in 1965. Fran and Herb were very proud of their dining membership in the Fort Salonga Golf Club. Herb became Treasurer of the Fort Salonga Civic Association. Fran, who was considerably older than Herb, died in 1994.
Herb had starting smoking at 15 and quit at 69. By then, the damage to his lungs was showing up in acute shortness of breath, especially in cold weather. In the last years of his life he depended heavily on an oxygen apparatus, and his attentive carer Marcia Crosdale, to maintain his breathing. His great big heart was strong and steady right up to the end, but his lungs could not generate enough air even to speak a word.