~ The Old Sachem ~

Future Chef Julia Child helped develop a recipe for shark repellent to help the U.S. Navy in World War II

By Bill Stewart

You know a lot about Julia Child. She was an American chef, author and TV personality. She introduced French cooking to America from her cookbooks and television cooking shows. Although she wasn’t professionally trained, she did attend Le Cordon Bleu in Paris while she lived there, as the wife of a diplomat. She later wrote a book about French cooking, and in 1963 she appeared on PBS television in “The French Chef,” which made French cuisine more available to American audiences.

She was born on August 15, 1912, in Pasadena, California, as Julia Caroline McWilliams and died August 13, 2004, in Montecito, California. She married Paul Cushing Child in 1946. Julia didn’t look too large on television, but she was 6 feet 2 inches tall.

She attended Smith College, a private liberal arts women’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts. Smith is part of a Five College Consortium that have collaborated to achieve as a group things that they can’t achieve individually. They include faculty exchanges, joint faculty appointments, joint course offerings, doctoral programs, and combined library offerings. This includes borrowing privileges between Smith, Amherst, Mount Holyoke and Hampshire Colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Julia collaborated with Martha Stewart in 1997 on TV as they made recipes together.

What you don’t know about Julia was her collaboration with the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which became the CIA, in World War II. She began experimenting with recipes for shark repellent to prevent sharks from accidentally detonating underwater explosives that were intended to destroy German submarines. Julia was the chief encryption clerk for the East Asian theater, responsible for registering, cataloging and channeling a great volume of highly classified communications for the OSS offices in Asia.

She was asked to solve the problem of too many OSS underwater explosives being set off by curious sharks. Her solution was to employ various concoctions of shark repellant, which were sprinkled in the water near the explosives and repelled the sharks. The repellent is still used today.

She later seriously went into cooking based on her abilities proven with the U.S. government. Now if you see Julia on TV, think of how she repelled sharks from destroying the bombs lowered into the water by the U.S. Navy to destroy enemy submarines. She was more than a chef, she made the Navy more able to blast ships.

  (Editor’s Note: Bill Stewart, who is better known to Saugus Advocate readers as “The Old Sachem,” writes a weekly column – sometimes about sports. He also opines on current or historical events or famous people.)