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Emily Dale Hosmer de Montluzin
b. August 6, 1915
Emily Dale Hosmer de Montluzin was bom in Greenwood, MS, and grew up in Greenwood and Yazoo City, the daughter of Emily Ann Gayden Hosmer of Winona and Harry Hosmer of Youngstown, NY. She graduated in 1935 from the University of Mississippi at the age of nineteen with a major in English, minors in French, Latin, and Spanish, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Education. Immediately 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 S62.50 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, Rene 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 in New Orleans than her school did in Bay St. Louis. 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 coordination 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 Rene 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 1945, she and her husband	Rene,	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 bom in 1948.
In 1970 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 currently provides an annual award of S3,000 to a graduating senior from any high school in Hancock County who has cxccllcd in the study of a foreign language and plans to