Mary Hinegardner McIntosh

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Mary Hinegardner McIntosh, 73, who worked as a writer, editor and communications consultant after being the personal assistant to labor leader Jimmy Hoffa in the early 1960s, died Aug. 28 at a hospital in Alameda, Calif. She had uterine and ovarian cancer. Mrs. McIntosh was a Washington native and graduated from  Anacostia High School in 1953. She did secretarial work for the Defense Department at the Pentagon and for the Southern Railway Corp. before becoming Hoffa's personal assistant at the Washington office of the Teamsters Union in 1960.

During her four years with the Teamsters, Mrs. McIntosh told her daughter, she believed the office was under constant surveillance. She believed her home telephone was wiretapped and said a telephone repairman came to the union's executive offices almost every day on the pretext of repairing phone problems.

Mary McIntosh worked for labor leader Jimmy Hoffa and was a partner at an employment agency.                                       (Family Photo)

Mrs. McIntosh left the Teamsters in 1964 to be office manager of the Bacon & Thomas law firm. She later held a similar position with Computer Sciences Corp.

From 1970 to '74, she was a partner in McIntosh Johnson &  Associates, a  Washington employment agency. She was an editor at the National Manpower Institute in 1975 and '76.

Mrs. McIntosh was a freelance writer and editor from the late 1970s until the early 1990s. She joined her daughter in business in 1995 as a communications and marketing consultant with McIntosh and Associates and later the McIntosh Creative Group.

Before moving to Alameda in 2002, she lived in Arlington County. She volunteered with the Little Theatre of Alexandria and was a member of Mount Vernon Unitarian Church in Alexandria, where she also taught Sunday school.

Her marriages to Allan F. Herbert and Chester McIntosh ended in divorce.

Survivors include a daughter from her first marriage, Susan J. McIntosh of San Francisco; and a sister.

-- Matt Schudel