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Essay on Julia Child
Julia Carolyn McWilliams was born on August 15, 1912 to parents John and Carol McWilliams in the conservative, wealthy community of Pasadena, California in the United States of America (U.S.); she grew up eating traditional New England food prepared by the family maid. After graduating from Smith College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1934, she moved to New York City and worked as a copywriter for the advertising department of upscale home furnishing firm W. & J. Sloane. After returning to California in 1937, shortly before her mother died, she spent four years at home, writing for local publications and briefly working in advertising again. Civic-minded, she volunteered with the American Red Cross and, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) after being turned down by the Navy for being too tall.
For a year, she worked at the OSS Emergency Sea Rescue Equipment Section in Washington, D.C., where she was mostly a file clerk but helped in the development of a shark repellant. She was posted to Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1943, where she met her future husband Paul Cushing Child, a high ranking OSS cartographer, and later to China, where she received the Emblem of Meritorious Civilian Service as head of the Registry of the OSS Secretariat. Following the war, she resided in Washington, D.C., where she was married on September 1, 1946 to Mr. Child, a man of sophisticated palate who came from a prominent Boston family and had lived in Paris as an artist and poet. Paul joined the U.S. Foreign Service and also introduced Julia to fine cuisine. She learned to cook in order to please him and entertain their large social circle. In 1948, they moved to Paris after the U.S. State Department assigned Mr. Child as an exhibits officer with the U.S. Information Agency in France....
