Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child by Noel Riley Fitch Page A

gang grabbed their sandwiches and went to the Mount Tom recreational area to hike. Smith’s traditions were much older than those at KBS, and even more effective. Rally Day was a day of skits, mostly ridiculous, put on by each class, along with singing on the steps of Hubbard Hall. Julia was always in the skits and was by nature a ham, said one of her classmates.
    Although she had “retired” from the basketball team, Julia remained physically active. The gymnasium was across Green Street, and the playing fields with tennis courts and riding stables were up Green Street and across the bridge. She engaged in hockey, tennis, archery, and baseball as well as swimming and riding. “I did not do as much in [organized] sports at Smith. I played hockey, which I had never played before; lacrosse I did not like because there were no boundaries and you ran your legs off.” She did play in a junior/senior game her last year and told her mother, “They were awfully mad at me for being so big.”
    The spring of her sophomore year the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and the girls rallied around Connie Morrow, the baby’s aunt. Constance was a Smith freshman and friend of Anita Hinckley when they both attended Milton Academy. When the baby’s body was discovered about eleven days later, the campus was devastated. Reality had intruded into the idyllic world of Smith.
    The Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles in the summer of 1932 and Julia’s friends were caught up in the excitement. When a group of them gathered in San Malo, they staged their own Olympics and played to the point of exhaustion day after day. To her brother, who was dating lovely Southern California girls, Julia’s physical play and short hair and girl’s school manner indicated that she did not want to be a girl. She was interested in boys, he thought, but her associations were more like being “one of the boys.”
    Before returning to school, Babe Hall came over to lunch with Julia and her mother. “Julia seemed much older than I, much more sophisticated,” said Babe, who was attending Occidental College. But Mrs. McWilliams had not changed a bit. She was just as lenient and whimsical as ever: When Julia told her mother and Babe about staying out all night with a group that included boys, her mother’s only comment was: “Did you have any breakfast? Don’t do that again, dear, until you have gained ten pounds.” Babe was amazed that Mrs. McWilliams was not warning her daughter against sneaking in, but against failing to eat out.
    While protecting the intelligence and virtue of America’s finest young flowers, Smith nurtured their leadership abilities and experience. Eleven years before, the Board of Trustees established a student government association that gave the women some power in establishing the rules and regulations of their social life: Student Council, the Judicial Board, the House of Representatives, and the House Councils. In her junior year, Julia was elected Junior Class Representative to the Student Council. Madeleine Evans, a prominent campus debater, served as president; Connie Thayer was vice president, and Mary Case was treasurer of their class. Julia was again appointed to the Grass Cops along with Marjorie Spiegel, Dorothy Fosdick, and Mary Case, and was refreshments chair for the prom committee, headed by Marjorie Spiegel. During this year she became friendly with a senior named Elizabeth (Betsy) Scofield Bushnell from New Haven, who more than a decade later would become her best friend when Julia married into the Bushnell-Bissell-Kubler-Child-Prudhomme tribe of friends.
    J UNIOR YEAR
    “I certainly hated to leave our Sunkist paradise,” she wrote her mother from the train headed back to Northampton, “But I do think it is much better for you not to have all of us around to worry about.” She was traveling with Gay Bradley, her childhood friend who after flunking out of Smith her freshman year was attending (and would graduate