About Emily H. de Montluzin
Obituary: Emily Dale Hosmer de Montluzin
Emily Dale Hosmer de Montluzin, formerly of Bay St. Louis, MS, and since 2005 of Florence, SC, died October 20, 2020, at the age of 105.
She was born August 6, 1915, in Greenwood, MS, and grew up in Greenwood and Yazoo City, the daughter of Emily Ann Gayden Hosmer of Winona, MS, and Harry Hosmer of Youngstown, NY. She graduated in 1935 from the University of Mississippi at the age of nineteen with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Education, having majored in English with minors in French, Latin, and Spanish. Immediately after graduation she passed Civil Service exams as a translator of French and Spanish and then found her first position as a teacher in a country school at Yocana, near Oxford, in the heart of what would later be known as Faulkner Country. Here for one year she taught all the English and spelling classes from the sixth grade through the twelfth, kept a study hall, and directed the senior play at a salary of $62.50 a month, for this was during the Great Depression.
After transferring to the faculty of Inverness High School and teaching English there for four years, she moved to Bay St. Louis in 1940 to teach Latin, Spanish, and English at Bay High School, and on her first day in town she met her future husband, René de Montluzin, Jr. Two weeks after the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor she was informed by the War Department that her country needed her services more than her school did: Postal censorship stations had been established in major port cities immediately after the outbreak of hostilities, and qualified translators were in demand to read all incoming and outgoing mail.
For a year (first in the Federal Building in New Orleans and later in New York City) she was a censor of French, Spanish, and English mail, being selected after several months for additional training in the breaking of codes and cyphers. Code-breaking in 1942, before the advent of computer programs, required intense coördination of mind and eye, necessitating the copying of suspicious messages, letter by letter, into the squares of graph paper, the use of rulers to isolate diagonal sequences of letters, and the mental concentration to eliminate systematically the innumerable possible permutations of patterns until the hidden message emerged. Emily’s greatest service to the war effort occurred when, on duty in New Orleans, she became suspicious of a letter (written in English) and after two and a half days broke its coded message--instructions to enemy operatives in the Canal Zone to blow up a lock in the Panama Canal.
Emily married René de Montluzin, Jr., in late 1942, and the two lived for several years in New London, Connecticut, where her husband was stationed during World War II at the U. S. Coast Guard Academy. For the rest of the war she worked in the Groton offices of the Electric Boat Company, builders of submarines for the Navy.
Back in Bay St. Louis in l945, she and her husband René, the owner of de Montluzin Pharmacy, became active in business and community affairs and in school activities. They were charter members of the Bay-Waveland Yacht Club and the Bay St. Louis Little Theatre (in which Emily frequently took part in plays), and Emily served as president of the Hancock County Library Board and as an active member of the altar guild of Christ Episcopal Church and of the Hancock County Historical Society. Their daughter, Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, was born in 1948.
In l970 Emily resumed her long-interrupted career as a teacher, returning to Bay Senior High School to teach French and Latin until her retirement in 1983. On that occasion a group of her students and friends established in her name the Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship, which now provides an annual award of $5,000 to a graduating senior from any high school in Hancock County who has excelled in the study of a foreign language and plans to continue that study. As of 2020 the Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship has been awarded to thirty-four exemplary foreign language students. After retirement Emily served for a number of years as a tutor in the Mississippi Adult Literacy Program, teaching English to immigrant women, and then as a volunteer teacher of Latin and French.
She and her daughter, Dr. Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, moved to Florence, SC, where the latter is a Professor of History, emeritus, at Francis Marion University, after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their home in Bay St. Louis. In Florence, Emily for years audited classes in English, French, German, History, and Mythology at Francis Marion University.
Emily is the author (with her daughter) of Dearest Arlette: Everyday Life in Postwar America and France, 1945-1955, as Recorded in the Letters of Two Reunited Families (2011).
Funeral services were conducted on November 16, 2020, at Christ Episcopal Church in Bay St. Louis, MS, followed by interment in Gardens of Memory Cemetery.
Mrs. de Montluzin Opened the World to Her Students at Bay High School
A Eulogy Delivered by Keith Folse, November 16, 2020
Hello, everyone.
My name is Keith Folse, and I was one of the many, many students that Mrs. de Montluzin taught in her long teaching career.
I’d like to start today by expressing my condolences to her daughter Lorraine as well as other family members and good friends, both those who are here today and the many who unfortunately could not be here with us.
When Lorraine asked me to deliver this eulogy, I didn’t hesitate to say yes, but I have to admit that the more I thought about writing the eulogy for such an amazing person as Mrs. de Montluzin, the more daunting the task seemed.
While today is certainly a sad day as we think of our loss, all of us here today have in fact gained so much from knowing Mrs. de Montluzin all these years.
So, what do I remember about Mrs. de Montluzin and more importantly, what will I remember about her for many more years to come? Well, there are so many things I could mention, but I’d like to share just a few of the things that I remember that have certainly impacted my life.
And I have a feeling that you, too, no matter how you knew her, will be able to relate to much of what I am going to share here now.
My initial introduction to Mrs. de Montluzin was as a student in her French class, but I think we became quite close, and I like to think of her as my second mom, and I often referred to her as my “education mom” because she was a key factor in helping me get into college and become a language teacher and eventually a university language professor.
Yes, my beginning with her was in French class, but how did I even end up in Mrs. de Montluzin’s French class in 10th grade?
Serendipity. Yes, it was luck. Pure luck. And in hindsight, it was life-changing in many ways because of who Mrs. de Montluzin was.
Some 47 years ago, which was 1973, I was in 9th grade at the old junior high school on 2nd Street, a building and location that perhaps a few of you here today may still remember. One day we were given a class scheduling form to fill out before we were to be transferred over to the big high school the next year. The form offered something called “elective classes,” which we junior high students found intriguing because we didn’t get many class choices back then, but there was indeed a choice for something called “foreign language.”
At this point, my memory is perhaps a little less clear, but I seem to recall that we could choose from three language options: Spanish, Latin, and French. To this day, I am not so sure why I chose French, but wow, just wow, what a lucky, incredibly lucky, break it was for me because that is how I ended up in Mrs. de Montluzin’s French 1 class in August of 1973. Little did I know the impact that she would have not only on the rest of my life in multiple ways.
Let me add here that I am certainly not the only former student here today. (How many others here today were former students of hers? Would you raise your hands please?) 🙂 And if you were in her French class, you may remember that on the very first day of class, she enticed us with 3 or 4 sentences in French, and she also said she would repeat that same French message at the end of the year – and she did – so we could see how much our French had improved.
I can actually remember seeing her standing in front of our class saying something like “Je m’appelle Madame de Montluzin et je suis votre professeur de français.” Everyone still remember that? “I am Mrs. de Montluzin, and I am your French teacher.”
And with that introduction to French, a whole new world was introduced to all of us. For me, learning French was like learning to manipulate chess pieces across the board. I loved it, and I loved how she taught it. I had no idea that French would be just the first of many foreign languages I would study and later teach, and I owe all of this to my beginning French class with Mrs. de Montluzin.
From time to time, friends or colleagues will tell me about their negative experiences with trying – not learning – but trying to learn a foreign language. And as I listen to their bad experiences, in my mind I can’t help but think something like “Your problem wasn’t French or Spanish or Latin. No, your real problem was that you didn’t have Mrs. Emily de Montluzin as your teacher.” What a shame!
Long after leaving Mississippi to work in several foreign countries, I used to write Mrs. de Montluzin – and by write, I do mean WRITE. Long before there was something called the Internet or email, there was the art of writing a letter that was sent in an envelope with colorful and sometimes exotic stamps on the outside. I distinctly remember that getting a letter from Mrs. de Montluzin in the daily mail was a real highlight of my week.
Now, you probably don’t know this, but Mrs. de Montluzin was a good letter writer. A very, very good letter writer.
And to this day, I still have many of her letters from the 1980s and 1990s, with the envelopes, with the exotic stamps. Getting one of her letters when I was living in Saudi Arabia or Japan or Malaysia or even Florida was always a treat.
Beautiful cursive penmanship tilted to the right. Carefully composed sentences made up of deliberate, meticulous vocabulary choices. Key words and phrases underlined. No, I will never forget. Lots and lots of underlining throughout.
In the past decade or so, letter writing gave way to some emails for a while, but then she and I communicated mostly via phone calls, almost always with Mrs. de Montluzin on one phone, Lorraine on another, and me on mine. Just as in her letters, Mrs. de Montluzin’s language was beautifully precise. And just as in her letters, Mrs. de Montluzin always seemed genuinely interested in me and my news.
And I’m sure others here today will attest to the same impression if you think about your interactions with her. She was an extremely good listener, and she would make you feel so important.
This is one of the many things I learned implicitly from her as a teacher. Our job is to make every student feel listened to and important. What we as teachers say to students matters, even if we can’t imagine the impact that our words on any given day might have on our students’ lives down the road.
Now, some of you may remember in French class that Mrs. de Montluzin used to give weekly vocabulary quizzes. At the end of the quiz, we’d carefully fold our papers vertically in half, write our names and the date on the outside, and pass in our papers.
You know… I may not remember what I ate for lunch yesterday, but I can distinctly remember in great detail her comments to me on one specific quiz. I can still see that paper and her writing. On that quiz, she had given us a bonus question in which she asked us to translate a somewhat complicated sentence from English to French. I don’t remember what the sentence was, but I do remember that when I got my paper back, she had written: “100 A+” And she had added “You have an outstanding grasp of French grammar.”
And of course this message was written in that beautiful cursive handwriting that she had, and the words outstanding and grasp were underlined. Those words, that message, were the kinds of small things that she did for all of us that mattered. They mattered in French class, and they especially mattered in a bigger sense, too.
I will always appreciate and love Mrs. de Montluzin for her genuine interest in each of us students as an individual person. I was a really shy, introverted teenager, and my success in French class was one of the first things I can ever remember being good at. And with her encouragement, we all got better.
It might sound trite, but that class and how she treated all of us changed my life, and I’ll bet that I’m not alone in saying that.
There are so many other things I could talk about – so many amazing memories not connected to French class.
Like how she could recite several stanzas of a poem by heart. I remember visiting Mrs. de Montluzin and Lorraine in Florence perhaps a decade ago, and after dinner, somehow the topic of literature came up, and without missing a beat, Mrs. de Montluzin started reciting a poem that she knew.
Now, for you or me, this might be the first 4 lines or maybe 8 lines or so, but no, she recited several stanzas of that poem. Impressive beyond belief. And by the way, she would have been in her early 90s when she was still doing this.
Or how about if you mentioned you were going to visit a new city, then she’d mail you a photocopy of her notes from the journal she kept when she was there in the 1970s or 1980s. And of course those notes would be very detailed with what to see and what to do in that city.
And yes, of course there was a lot of underlining, just to make sure you knew what was extra important to see and do there. Always a teacher, she was going to make sure she had really helped you with your trip.
And now, I’d like to share what I consider to be the most profound thing Mrs. de Montluzin ever told me. It was perhaps 20 or 25 years ago – many years after she had retired from teaching.
“Keith, you never know what has happened to someone before they come to your class. When I would look out at all the faces of the boys and girls in my class at Bay High, I would often wonder if they had been able to eat breakfast that morning or what they had been through the night before.”
And I don’t know exactly why, but this one statement really stuck in my head, both as a teacher and as a human being. We teachers are trained to teach our subject matter, yes, but the education courses rarely talk about the individuals we’re teaching. And yet, treating each person as an individual was one of Mrs. de Montluzin’s strong suits. She made me, and many others, feel important, and this kind of confidence can be really important to young teenagers.
I’d like to end today with a letter to the editor that I wrote that was published in our local Sea Coast Echo the year Mrs. de Montluzin celebrated her 100th birthday.
April 5, 2015
Dear Editor:
Thank you for your March 11th article "Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship begins fourth decade of awards to superior language students." This scholarship continues to provide thousands of dollars toward the education of many of the best high school graduates from Hancock County. While your article explained the origin of the scholarship and its recipients, your readers should know about the great teacher whom this scholarship honors.
In 1973-74, I took French 1 at Bay High with Mrs. de Montluzin. Little did I know to what extent this one class with this teacher would influence the rest of my life. When I was growing up, I used to dream about traveling to some faraway international destination, but this was certainly not possible with my family's very limited means. In French class, however, Mrs. de Montluzin magically opened up the world. She described the impressive Cathedral of Notre Dame on a small island in the middle of the Seine River in Paris, talked about Monet's garden where so many of his famous paintings were set, and retold classic French tales such as Les Miserables so well that we all couldn't wait for our daily soap-opera installment of what had happened to poor little Cosette.
These lessons made all of us feel an awareness that there was a world outside of our Bay St. Louis, and she gave me much-needed hope that one day my life might be better and I somehow might be able to see that world. Always being a practical person, I remember asking her in one class to describe what it was like to fly in a plane -- because I could never imagine doing so -- and she ever so carefully detailed the plane revving up its engines, moving forward faster and faster down the runway, until you felt a little bump, when meant the plane was in the air. Now at age 56 -- some four decades after taking Mrs. de Montluzin's class -- I have visited 49 countries and taught English in four countries. As a university professor, I train teachers to teach English overseas. I am passing on to my students the love and fascination of seeing "that world." All of this grew out of my initial foreign language study with Mrs. de Montluzin, and for this, I am forever grateful.
Signed,
Keith Folse
So, friends, in parting, I would simply say, “Thank you, Mrs. de Montluzin. Thank you for being you. You were and are very, very much appreciated because you made a difference. I hope you knew how special you were and will remain to all of us forever.”