Margaret Herrick was born Margaret Buck in Spokane, Washington. She earned a library degree from the University of Washington, and in 1929 became head librarian of the Yakima Public Library. Miss Buck married Donald Gledhill, an assistant to the executive secretary of the Academy, and in 1931 she moved to Hollywood to join her husband. Mrs. Gledhill soon offered her services to the Academy as its volunteer librarian, and was well on the way to building the Academy’s library when Donald Gledhill was named executive secretary in 1933. Throughout the 1930s, Mrs. Gledhill continued to develop and improve the library and its holdings. Her position as the Academy’s librarian was formalized in 1936.

In 1943, Margaret Gledhill successfully assumed her husband’s duties when he left for military service in World War II. The couple divorced in 1945, and soon after, the Academy Board of Governors offered Mrs. Gledhill the executive position on a permanent basis. In 1946, Mrs. Gledhill married Philip A. Herrick. They divorced in 1951, but she continued to use his name professionally.

During Mrs. Herrick's service as the Academy's executive director, she negotiated the Academy’s first television contract and oversaw the transformation of the annual Oscar telecast into a major television event. Mrs. Herrick also expanded the Academy's activities into several non-Awards areas and laid the foundation for what is now considered to be one of the world's finest film-related libraries.

Margaret Herrick was executive director of the Academy for 27 years. When she retired in January 1971, then-Academy President Daniel Taradash said, "With Mrs. Herrick's resignation, the Academy is witnessing the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. It is difficult to find the words to sum up what she has meant to the Academy; in addition to the efficiency with which she has administered the affairs of the Academy, she has brought to the office a flair and vigor seldom equaled anywhere." Following her retirement, the Academy library was renamed in her honor. Margaret Herrick died on June 20, 1976.

Eulogy for Margaret Herrick by Daniel Taradash 1976

"The news reports said: 'There are no immediate survivors.' That is a factual error. Margaret Herrick has three thousand, nine hundred and five immediate survivors. That is the number of members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. We are all symbolic relatives, joined by the living legacy she left us, for without her I doubt very much if our Academy would have survived through the decades, would have prospered and grown to achieve its present international reputation for integrity and dedication to excellence.

"There are other survivors as well. Her friends, of course, and then all her co-workers, the executives, assistants and secretaries who derived from her impassioned devotion to the Academy a devotion of their own.

"She came to Hollywood from the state of Washington where her father was a Superior Court Judge. She began forty years of service to the Academy as its librarian in 1931, became the Executive Director in 1943 and held that post until her retirement on January 1st, 1971.

"Behind the image of strength and force and dignity she presented was an incredible fortitude. At the age of twenty, she was a victim of polio and typhoid fever, resulting in temporary paralysis. Through her life she endured eleven operations, most of them major. But I don't know anyone who ever heard her complain or saw her wince with pain or show a trace of self-pity.

"She managed the day-to-day affairs of the Academy and its long-range plan efficiently, dynamically. And she didn't take to criticism of the organization or herself with what one would term graciousness. I'd watch her read a letter, hand it quickly to her executive secretary (and close friend) Lois Hamby, and mutter, 'File and forget.' I suppose she was wrong now and then, but for every time she was, nine times she was right. On occasion the atmosphere of a precision instrument at work in her office gave way. I'll never forget the day I walked in to see Lois lying flat on her stomach, stretched full-out on the floor. I recoiled with shock until I realized her arm was groping beneath the sofa, trying to dislodge Margaret's beloved poodle, Bouffe, from his hiding place.

"Out of the office, at her home in Brentwood, another aspect of Mrs. Herrick took over. Her great hobby was horticulture, and her large garden and greenhouse brimmed with camellias, roses, exotic shrubs and the largest cymbidiums you've ever seen. When she moved to Laguna Niguel after her retirement, her home and yard were much smaller but again she could be found tending her flowers, joking with her man-of-all-work, Ben Neeley, and talking of the book she hoped one day to complete about her experiences in the Academy. She didn't complete it -- and I don't know if she really ever started it -- but it was affirmation that the Academy was never out of her mind. It remained to the end a source of nourishment for her, a repository of her ambitions, a kind of soothing therapy.

"When Margaret Herrick became the Academy librarian, the 'stacks' consisted of a pile of trade papers. She built it, slowly, insistently, book by book, file by file, always hoping that eventually it would be, in a sense, the cornerstone of the Academy. One thing I don't believe she dared hope for was that it would one day be named after her. It's wonderful to know that a few months ago, though in a wheelchair, she was able to visit the new building* and glow at the handsome and spacious Margaret Herrick Library which contains the finest collection of historical and technical information on motion pictures in the world, a tribute not only to Mrs. Herrick but to the medium of film itself.

"Everyone has his own thoughts about how to live and how to die. Yesterday, wondering what to conclude with here, my thoughts went to a poem. And it seemed to me that when Bryant wrote the last stanza of 'Thanatopsis,' he might well have been speaking to, and about, Margaret Herrick:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

"Margaret, your many survivors know indeed that you are enjoying pleasant dreams."

* At 8949 Wilshire Boulevard, where the Library was then housed on the fourth and fifth floors. It moved to its current location at 333 S. La Cienega Boulevard in Beverly Hills in 1991.