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07/23/2026
On this day in 2003, Julia Child received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The world knew her by then as the towering, warbling queen of French cooking. But decades earlier, before the cookbooks and the television lights, Child spent World War II in Washington doing something considerably stranger.
At 6’2″, she was told she was too tall for the military — so she joined the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime spy agency that would become the CIA, one of only about 4,500 women in its ranks. Working out of an office in the District, she helped develop shark repellent to keep curious sharks from setting off explosives meant for enemy ships. It was in the OSS that she met a fellow officer named Paul Child, and after the war the two bought a bright yellow fixer-upper on the edge of Georgetown.
Boundary Stones has the full story on what happened in that Georgetown kitchen at the link below.
TONIGHT: Don't miss the new four-part miniseries that tells the human stories behind mankind’s quest to explore space. In Part 2 of 4, “The Russian Thing,” the Soviet Union falls and Russia welcomes U.S. astronauts to the space station Mir — but cooperation between the former Cold War enemies is threatened by a run of disasters onboard.
Once Upon a Time in Space airs TONIGHT at 9pm on WETA PBS and WETA+.
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