Margetta Hirsch Doyle
Margetta Hirsch Doyle
Margetta Hirsch, 1945 Colonial Echo
Margetta Hirsch Doyle (née Margetta Doris Hirsch) was born August 16, 1925 in Brooklyn, New York City and grew up in Long Island. Margetta was first interested in English and writing when she arrived at William & Mary, and she wanted to be a journalist. A friend of hers, Cary Grant, said she would take any course Margetta picked if she would take an Economics class with her. Margetta loved that class so much that she switched her major to General Business, an economics and psychology oriented degree.
Her father, Benjamin Franklin Hirsch (1887-1972) was born in New Jersey. His father, Margetta’s paternal grandfather, was born in New York to two Bavarian German immigrants while his mother, the paternal grandmother, emigrated from Germany or Holland (In the 1900 and 1910 census her birthplace and language were listed as German while the 1930 census it was Dutch). In 1910, at the age of 22, he was working as a clerk for a surgical company. By 1940, just prior to Margetta’s enrollment at William & Mary, he was Executive Vice President of Davis & Geck, a surgical suture development company, with an annual income of $5,000, equivalent to $94,000 today. Her mother, Marguerite Watts (1895-1968) was born in New York City. Both of her parents were born in New York City as well, but her father, a shirt cutter, was the son of two Scottish immigrants.
After graduating from William & Mary, Margetta started working as an editor at a successful and well-known marketing research firm in New York City, Stuart, Dougall & Associates. There, she met her future husband Joseph Bernard Doyle (1921-2012) who was employed as a Junior associate. They were engaged in 1947 and married in Acapulco, Mexico, in 1948 when he was twenty-seven and she was twenty-three. Margetta worked at the firm until 1953 when their first daughter, Kathryn, was born. Later they had another daughter named Lauren. In a 2006 interview, Margetta noted that it was customary for women to work until they had their first child and not to return until they were grown, and she did just that. She prided herself on being an intelligent confidant and advisor to Joe as he advanced in his career, which ultimately took the family to Canada in 1958 where they have since stayed.
Margetta remembered her father fondly as an avid record keeper who kept diaries of his own, and from a young age she would get blank journals as gifts as his way of encouraging her to record her life as well. Margetta always kept a diary, both before and after her time at William & Mary, maintaining the practice well into her adulthood. She told her interviewer, “I’m not as gushy as I was back then, nor quite as naïve. I think in those days I was very conscious that it was a record I was keeping. And I was pretty careful. There isn’t much juicy gossip in there. Also, I wouldn’t have been surprised if my mother has read it at home—not in a sneaky way but more like ‘Oh, what were you doing last June, dear?’ It wasn’t unburdening my soul as much as— it’s a little more personal now.”