Woman of the Week – Julia Child

While most of us know Julia Child as a famed television chef and bold television personality, she had a background in research. Her first foray into cooking actually stemmed from an experiment during World War II.

She was born Julia McWilliams in Pasadena, California and attended a private boarding school while growing up. She graded from Smith College in 1934 with a degree in history. She moved to New York City after college and worked as copywriter for advertising firm W & J Sloane.

When World War II began, Child tried to join both the both the WACs (Women’s Army Corps) and the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) in the Navy. She was reject from both because at 6’ 2”, she was considered too tall.

Instead, she found a job as a typist with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was the precursor to today’s CIA or the U.S. Army’s Special Forces.

She was moved to the Secret Intelligence division, where she worked as a research assistant typing 10,000 names onto note cards to keep track of officers. She proved herself to be smart and organized and rose through the ranks in Washington over the next few years. She worked directly under General William Donovan during this time. However, she was growing bored with administrative type work and longed for more.

General Donovan recommended she help out with a shark problem that the U.S. Navy was facing. As members of the Navy attempted to plant explosives under German U-boats, sharks were finding the bombs and pushing them out of position. The bombs were detonating too early and missing the targets. The sharks were making the bombs have the opposite effect, instead of destructing; they served as a warning to the Germans who could then flee the area.

During the first 18 months of the war, there had been also more than 20 shark attacks on soldiers and morale was low. The Navy was looking for a way to keep the sharks away. As if the missions conducted weren’t dangerous enough, the Naval officers certainly didn’t want to worry about a shark attack too.

The OSS Emergency Rescue Equipment (ERE) committee was created to spearhead this work. From the CIA archives, The ERE was run by Captain Harold J. Coolidge, a scientist from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Dr. Henry Field, Curator of the Field Museum of Natural History.

They experimented with many different compounds to repel the sharks. They tried over 100 substances including common poisons.

They eventually found that copper acetate was most effective, and formed the chemical into a small disk that smelled like a dead shark. It was 60 percent effective when tested.

But Navy officials were hesitant that the compound would work, especially if a group of sharks was experiencing a feeding frenzy.

But, word leaked out about the ERE’s shark repellent and the media picked it up. Requests for the compound poured in from the Army and Coast Guard and morale was improving. The repellent was used into the 1970s.

After wrapping up the shark project, she worked in China and Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka). During that time she helped get top secret documents to their proper places.

After the war, she married fellow OSS employee Paul Child. He accepted a post in Paris and she went with him. That’s where her love of food began. She spent her days at Le Cordon Bleu school. She also joined a women’s cooking club where she met Simone Beck, who suggested she write a book for Americans on the art of French cooking.

That’s exactly what she did. The rest, as they say, is history.