OSS Veteran Julia (McWilliams) Child

[Richard]

Julia Child - OSS veteran and celebrity chef.

Our Lady of the Kitchen
Laura Jacobs, Vanity Fair, Aug 2009

The mirror was always in the drawer, the little handheld signal mirror, to use if one is lost. It was standard issue for Americans working in the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), the dashing precursor to the C.I.A., active during World War II. In 2001, when Julia Child’s entire kitchen was relocated from her house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the first floor of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C., the rescue mirror went, too. It is displayed on a wall in the exhibit, forever near the kitchen drawer where she kept it—a leap of light, an SOS, symbolic of the point in her life when she was found.

It is at this point—the two years she spent in the O.S.S.—that Noël Riley Fitch begins her 1997 biography of Julia Child, Appetite for Life. “I asked myself,” Fitch remembers, “What’s the critical moment that changed her life and initiated her into the woman we know—the adult Julia?” The answer was Paul. In early 1945, the O.S.S. had transferred Julia McWilliams from Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), to Kunming, China, where she continued her work as head of the Registry, processing all top-secret communications. She was glad of the transfer because fellow O.S.S.-er Paul Child had been sent to China some months before. A worldly intellectual with a poetic sensibility, an artist and photographer who relished wine, women, and song, he designed war rooms for General (Lord) Mountbatten in Kandy and for General Wedemeyer in Kunming. Paul thought Julia unworldly, unfocused, and doubtless a virgin—“a hungry hayseed” is how she would describe herself—but also steady, game, a “classy dame,” and “brave,” he wrote his twin brother, Charlie, “about being an old maid!” He was 42 to her 32, five feet ten to her six feet two. He was looking for a soulmate, but had counted Julia out. And yet their sure-footed friendship, forged over Indo-Asian food and shared danger, was climbing, slipping, into love. Which led to bed. And then, in 1946, when the war was over, marriage.

(cont'd) http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/fe...ia-child200908

[Peregrino]

Definitely a "classy dame". She was always one of the women I held in high regard. Young women growing up today could certainly use more role models of her caliber. Pity she wasn't a redhead too.

[Richard]

Concur - definitely head and shoulders above the likes of Valerie Plame.

Richard's $.02

[greenberetTFS]

For reference go here......http://www.biography.com/articles/Julia-Child-9246767

Big Teddy

[swpa19]

Julia Childs was not the only "later in life celeb" that was involved in OSS ops. Some other names that may surprise you that are of an age that would remember:

http://faqgo.com/2008/08/14/julia-ch...en-were-spies/