The Boston Globe ran a more detailed obituary for the wonderful Julia Child. I certainly never knew that she was in the OSS:
[…] Julia Carolyn McWilliams was born Aug. 15, 1912 in Pasadena, Calif., the eldest child of Julia Carolyn "Caro" Weston McWilliams and John McWilliams Jr. In 1934, she graduated from Smith College, where she, by her own admission, had done mediocre work.Posted by rv at August 15, 2004 04:12 PM to newsTall, freckled, athletic, and spunky, she had hopes of writing for The New Yorker. She did a brief stint at Coast, a literary magazine in San Francisco in the late '30s. She rejected a marriage proposal from the Times Mirror newspaper heir, Harrison Chandler. Jobs at W.& J. Sloane furniture's advertising and marketing department in New York, then later in Beverly Hills, did not work out. She applied to serve in the Navy WAVES, or Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services, but was rejected. "I was too long," she told biographer Noel Riley Fitch. Mrs. Child was 6 feet 2 inches tall and wore a size 12A shoe.
Mrs. Child's foreign service career began in 1942 under William "Wild Bill" Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services. She volunteered for India, where she met Paul Cushing Child, a man 10 years her senior who was worldly, artistic, and largely self-educated. She did not consider herself much of an intellectual compared to him; all she knew about food was how to eat. Paul Child had lived in Europe, spent a decade with a brainy and beautiful older woman, and considered the 32-year-old file clerk rather naive.
Both were transferred to China, where Paul Child began looking at her differently. As chronicled by her biographer, she had a staff of 10, coded information sent to agents, and took charge of a foot locker filled with opium for paying spies. She could also throw a party together in hours. They married in 1946, in Bucks County, Pa. […]