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

Northern California with the Bohemian Club. By the end of the 1930s, John McWilliams was often in downtown Los Angeles in his capacity as vice president of the J. G. Boswell Company, which owned 20,000 acres of farmland in Kings County, where it raised stock, grain, and cotton. He knew the central regions of California like the back of his hand and was a natural consultant for the giant company. He was instrumental in their developing the Buena Vista Lake property.
    Julia’s father had long been a friend of the Boswell brothers in Pasadena, especially Jim Boswell, because they both had land in Kern County. When their father began working for Jim Boswell about 1940, all the McWilliams children knew was that their father was some kind of consultant for Boswell, a shrewd businessman with a strong Southern accent. How much this work contributed to their sizable family inheritance they are uncertain. Colonel James G. Boswell was the largest cotton grower in the world. He was driven out of Georgia by the boll weevil and settled in California to become one of the most powerful farmers in the state and marry Ruth Chandler, the daughter of land baron and Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler. The Boswell empire, run from its downtown Los Angeles headquarters, extended northward and centered in the San Joaquin Valley, the state’s most fertile region, where Boswell grew cotton, wheat, and seed alfalfa. Through the end of the century, his company would supply the cotton for Jockey underwear, L. L. Bean shirts, and Fieldcrest towels.
    Los Angeles’s development was symbolized by the new LA city hall, a twenty-eight-floor building towering over downtown. Construction, which began when Julia was away at school, cost $4.8 million. Her father knew the movers and shakers of America’s fastest-growing area. During her holidays at home, Julia continued to visit downtown with her mother and to share Sunday dinner now with Aunt Annie McWilliams Gans, who moved her family from Hagerstown, Maryland, into a home on Euclid in order to care for Julia’s grandmother Clara Dana McWilliams. Cousins Alice and Dana became a steady presence in Julia’s life.
    The summer before Julia’s senior year, Caro suffered a stroke in Santa Barbara, after which one side of her face permanently sagged. She took to bed increasingly with the Weston curse: high blood pressure. Dorothy, five years younger than Julia and not yet a teenager, felt forsaken by her mother. Caro, as her own mother before her, would inevitably abandon her chicks, a painful reality for a woman who, in Julia’s words, “loved being a mother. She was a great deal of fun … [and] so devoted a mother.”

    F ROM THE FIRST to the last day at KBS, Jukie was immensely popular. She was never interested in domesticity or food, except when hungry, and she was often hungry. Despite her “love of jelly donuts,” she remained as lean and tall as an adolescent boy. From today’s perspective, she looked like a fashion model.
    The school uniform was becoming on her, especially the blue-and-white-plaid winter skirt (with white blouse). She was hipless, so the skirts gave her a certain fullness. No one looked particularly fetching in the blue-and-white-checked gingham summer dresses (dresses whose length rose and fell according to the current style of each decade over fifty years). The blue crepe de chine dresses with Peter Pan collars that the boarders wore for dinner were no more appealing. French blue was Miss Branson’s (and Julia’s) favorite color. Only through scarves, belts, and socks could the girls express any individuality. Julia had an advantage: her height. Her friend Roxane gives the best description of Julia at this time:
She was … gangly, a little awkward, standing tall but stooping slightly to look benignly down on the rest of us. She was serious about life, but had a unique way of seeing the humor in incidents, and expressing it in her deep, rather thick manner of speaking.