Paul Child's Obituary

Boston Globe, The (MA) - May 14, 1994
Deceased Name: PAUL CHILD, AT AGE 92 WAS ARTIST AND RETIRED FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICER

Paul Child of Cambridge, a retired foreign service officer, artist, photographer and illustrator, died Thursday in Fairlawn Nursing Home in Lexington. He was 92.

Mr. Child was the husband of Julia Child, one of America's best-known cooks, with whom he collaborated on her public television programs and gourmet cookbooks. He provided many of the photographs and drawings for her kitchen bibles, such as "From Julia Child's Kitchen" and "Julia Child & Company."

Indeed, it was Mr. Child, a kindly, soft-spoken man of medium height with a thatch of gray-white hair, who helped inspire her to become a gourmet chef in the first place.

Before their marriage in 1946, Julia Child was as apt to curdle her hollandaise, char her crepes or let her souffles sag as many another mortal. ''I was willing to put up with all that awful cooking to get Julia," Mr. Child once said. But he prodded her to take cooking lessons and she went from fumbling chef to French chef.

When asked why she took up the art of cooking, Julia Child once said: "For the same reason every woman gets flour up to her elbows. To please a man."

"Julia couldn't do anything without Paul," a friend once commented.
"We are never not together," she told People magazine in 1975. "He's my chief taster and critic. Paul's my number-one guinea pig."

Not only did Mr. Child encourage his wife's career and serve as collaborator, he acted as her sous-chef as well. He chopped and minced vegetables for her early shows on WGBH-TV (Ch. 2), helped with the scripts and mopped up when, in a moment of exuberance, she would slosh potato pancakes on the floor. In all, he designed 11 home kitchens for her in this country and abroad.

"Our life," she once said, "is an ongoing adventure. I have never been bored by Paul."
"With Julia and me, love is a complex tapestry," Mr. Child said in an interview before his death. "All our discoveries have been good ones. Some people go sour and move to other persons. We've not had to."

Mr. Child was born in Montclair, N.J., and brought up in Boston. His father was director of the Smithsonian Institution's astrophysical laboratory. After graduating from Boston Latin School and Columbia University, he succumbed early to wanderlust, working variously as a waiter, lumberman, artist, teacher, stained-glass cutter and cabinet maker in this country and abroad. In pre-World War II days, he met Ernest Hemingway and had been a guest at Gertrude Stein's salon.

Mr. Child served in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. He was stationed in Ceylon as a mapmaker on Lord Louis Mountbatten's staff when he met Julia McWilliams, a filing clerk with the OSS at the time. Later they both did stints in Kunming, China, and in India.

The Childs were married in 1946 in Bucks County, Pa. But there was no honeymoon and almost no wedding. En route to the ceremony, a truck that had lost its brakes smashed into their car and Julia Child was thrown out. It took 23 stitches to sew the bride's scalp, but she gamely went on with the ceremony.

When the OSS disbanded, Mr. Child went into the foreign service and was posted to the US embassy in Paris. It was there his wife took to cooking with a vengeance, enrolling in the Cordon Bleu cooking school and becoming a member of the select Le Cercle des Gourmettes.

Mr. Child retired from the foreign service in 1961 and the couple returned to the United States, settling in Cambridge. They continued to maintain a house in Provence in southern France, where they spent several months each year.

A connoiseur of good wines as well as a lover of good food, Mr. Child had a well-stocked wine cellar.

He leaves his wife, Julia (McWilliams).
Funeral arrangements are private.
EDRISC;11/20 NKELLY;05/15,12:50 CHILD14
Edition: THIRDPage: 75Copyright (c) 1994 Globe Newspaper Company

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