Hirshon, Irving, 1921-1999

Irving Hirshon was born April 25, 1921. In a 1993 oral history interview conducted by his grandson, Nicholas Hirshon, Irving Hirshon said that he was born on Liberty Avenue in East New York, Brooklyn, and attended Public School 183 and Samuel J. Tilden High School. He said he started playing clarinet at age 16 and briefly performed with symphony orchestras based in Dallas and Cleveland before attending the Juilliard School and enlisting in the Fort Jay Army Band on Governors Island during World War II. He married Elaine Lipshie, honeymooned at Lake Placid, and settled in North Merrick on Long Island, where the couple raised two sons, Arnold and Elliot. Irving became a professional photographer and operated Hirshon Studios in Merrick, New York.

Hirshon died on August 2, 1999. The Hirshon family’s papers and ephemera are housed in the Queens Borough Public Library Archives in New York. Other slides taken by Irving Hirshon are located at the Binghamton University Special Collections and Archives, the City of Toronto Archives, the Dearborn Historical Museum, the New York State Library, and the San Francisco Public Library.