Tag: Paris

The Paris Study Group – A Defining Year

Over the years, in explaining the backstory behind my book, The French Desk: A Brooklyn Gal’s Journey into Wartime Propaganda, I would mention that my mother had participated in the Paris Study Group to my friends, and they would invariably say, “What was that?”

Paris Study Group (1938) – Source: Family photos

The Paris Study Group (PSG) was a group of catholic college women (about 20 per year), who travelled to France for their junior year abroad, lived with a French family and studied at either the Sorbonne or the Catholic Institute of Paris. The students came from all over the world. The program ran between 1928 and 1940.

The PSG Founder and Director, Miss Erin Samson, was born to a French father and an Irish mother and grew up in in Washington, DC. As a young girl, Miss Samson traveled to France often to visit her father’s relatives and ended up attending college there, earning her French Baccalaureate at the Catholic Universite of Angers. Miss Samson also went on to study in England, earning advanced literature degrees at Oxford. Continue reading “The Paris Study Group – A Defining Year”

Good Things Are Worth Waiting For

About ten years ago, I embarked on a journey to write the story of my mother’s wartime experience when she worked as a civilian in the Office of War Information (OWI). I had many letters – maybe 65 or so – she had written home in 1944 and 1945, saved by my grandparents for some reason.

My mother – Alberta Conway Jones (early 1950s) – Source: Family Photos

When my grandparents sold their brownstone in Brooklyn way back in the late 1960’s, my mother took all those saved WW2 letters to our house and promptly stored them in our attic for thirty-five years. When we sold our parent’s house thirty years later, I took those loosely tethered letters to my home and finally had a chance to look through them carefully.

As I went through them, I knew there was a story to tell. The challenge was where to start and how to approach these large moments in history: Continue reading “Good Things Are Worth Waiting For”

From My Mother’s OWI Garret

In the house I grew up in, our attic was stacked with boxes. A decade could be retraced in an hour’s time.  Births, deaths, baptisms, confirmations and graduations and various ephemera littered the rafters. Frayed boxes bulged with old photographs and letters.

ACJ Letters home during WWI – Source: Family Photos

I was the youngest of my family and almost the youngest of my entire extended family. So much had transpired before I had attained an awareness of what was going on. In the attic, I was able to look back and recapture some sense of my family’s life before I came along. I found it captivating to think about where they had lived and to read about the details of their lives. And rich material there was. Continue reading “From My Mother’s OWI Garret”