I too read with sadness of the passing of cooking personality
extraordinaire Julia Child. She and I had a personal connection,
although she was unaware of it. Back in my junior year (1991) I took
a work study job at the Schlesinger Women's History Library at
Harvard. I had heard that library jobs were cushy and let you catch
up on your studies at work. Although I don't precisely recollect, I
may have also thought that a women's history library might be great
place to meet girls. I was wrong on both counts. Most of the women
that worked there were not exactly keen to meet guys. Some of them
even seemed to resent my presence, although a few didn't seem to hold
my gender against me. Probably to keep me out of the sight of the
patrons I was stuck in the back and given the tedious job of entering
new books into the library database, which more or less meant unending
drudgery. I was paid the standard work study rate of $6.70/hour. I
split my 12 hours a week into 3 shifts of 4 hours, which was about the
most I could stomach in a sitting.

They had been unable to find a work study student for some time (I
suspect they may have been holding out for a female candidate), and
thus they were completely backlogged—there was a room half-filled with
books waiting for me when I started, and new books were coming in all
the time. It was quite depressing—even after several weeks I felt
like I wasn't making a dent. But over the next few months I made some
serious headway and started feeling pretty good about myself. And
then Julia stepped in.

One day I heard that Julia Child had decided to donate her entire
cookbook collection to the library, and they were planning a reception
for her. They proudly announced that it gave the Schlesinger Library
the largest cookbook collection in the world. I thought it a bit
strange that a place that was all about empowering women would
identify itself with something so related to the traditional women's
role as homemaker. Although I wasn't invited, being I was a lowly
backoffice peon, I was working that day and did get a glimpse of Julia
herself. I was shocked both by how tall she was and how old she
looked. Around that time the cookbooks showed up.

To my great dismay my room, just recently fairly cleared out, was now
overflowing with cookbooks. I recall being told that there were a
couple of thousand of them. I was quite bitter, but, somewhat
dispirited, I started digging in. Most were autographed by the
author, with a note saying something along the lines of "To Julia—You
are my great inspiration and I hope you enjoy my cookbook." It seemed
like everyone who ever wrote a cookbook felt compelled to send her a
copy. I heard that she lived in the neighborhood with her bedridden
husband, and suspected that she just got tired of all the books
filling up her garage or whatever, decided to clean house and unloaded
them on the nearest taker. I wonder if she even bothered to look at
most of them.

I spent the rest of the year entering her cookbooks into the database,
and, while I got through a lot of them, there was still a lot more to
do when I left. But that job fell to my successor, God bless him (or
her). I never saw Julia again; perhaps she wanted to be done with the
whole affair. But, after spending so much time with her former
possessions, and reading so many of those personal scribbles addressed
to her, I did feel a little connection to her. We named our first
child Julia, and I wonder if somehow I got that idea in my head from
my time with her cookbooks.