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

from) Radcliffe. They played bridge most of the way. During this junior year the Gang of Five was joined by Happy Gaillard, who, like Hester Adams, with whom she roomed, was from New York City. Happy had gone to Vassar, hated it, and transferred into Hubbard House and Smith. As a transfer student, Happy would not match the campus leadership roles of the other girls, but she would enjoy the fun. Charlotte Snyder, who lived in Ellen Emerson Hall on the other side of Paradise Pond, said, “That group had a great sense of humor. I was in awe of them. I was terribly serious [and pious] at the time.”
    Another change in the gang was the distraction of young men who came to call. Connie remembers that Hester, a freckled girl with an old-fashioned face and wide smile, would come home at the last minute and just as the bell was ringing and her friends were looking out the window, Henry, her future husband, would kiss her good night. That summer Connie also met her future husband, a senior at Yale, and drifted away from the weekend activities of the gang.
    One of the most important events of the junior year was the declaration of a major. Though Julia took more classes in music (a passion she shared with Mary), she chose history: “It had more options.” Yet a majority of her friends—Peggy, Connie, and Mary—chose the same major. Perhaps they used the same reasoning, though Julia remembered, “In those days there were not many options: secretary or teacher or nurse seemed the only [ones],” but marriage was the priority. Maybe they were influenced by politically liberal teachers, one of whom took his students to a walkout at the textile mill in Northampton (much to the dismay of Anita Hinckley’s father, who believed she was becoming a “flaming communist”). The history teachers were popular, as was Roosevelt, who won in a landslide in November 1932. Julia, who still thought like her father, wanted Hoover to defeat FDR and was still largely unaware of union leader Harry Bridges and the crippling strikes on the West Coast.
    Julia took Dr. Leona Gabel’s Renaissance and Reformation course (History 351) and earned B+ both semesters. She thought that Gabel was “a real brain.” Gabel wrote in Julia’s academic record that she admired Julia’s “qualities of leadership,” her “droll, humorous, likable personality,” and her ability to take “criticism not only kindly but responsively.” Julia’s paper on one of the promiscuous Renaissance popes caused quite a sensation in the class, remembers Mary Ford (Cairns), one of two sisters from Pasadena who were ahead of Julia at Smith.
    Because of the popularity of English professor Mary Ellen Chase, a famous “lady novelist” or “authoress” as they called her in those days, many students thought about writing careers. Chase gave a very good course on the novel to crowded classrooms. Though she did not take Chase’s course, Julia decided to become a “woman novelist”: “My plan was to be a woman novelist … there were some famous women novelists in those days.” During an interview decades later for the oral history of Smith, Julia could only explain her failing to take a course with Chase as pure romanticism, thinking “I had to live first and then I’d write. I was … an utter adolescent. The idea was to get everything else so that you can get the writing later. I was a very adolescent person all the time up till I was about thirty.”
    Later she partially justified ignoring the novel-writing class by saying that when she went to hear Chase give a lecture in Washington, DC, in the 1950s, she was disappointed, calling her a “semi-charlatan” and a “show-off … it was like watching a piece of theater. You were there to see her, not to learn anything.” Julia told an interviewer in 1980 that she was “inspired” to be a writer by reading the stories of Somerset Maugham. Instead she became something of a Maugham character, meeting her husband-to-be in