James Rives Childs (1893-1987)

Diplomat and author J. Rives Childs lived here in his youth. During World War I, he served in the U.S. Army as a code breaker in France. After working for the American Relief Administration in the Balkans and the Soviet Union, he began a 30-year diplomatic career in 1923. During World War II, as chargé d'affaires at the American Legation in Tangier, Morocco, Childs helped 1,200 Hungarian Jews obtain entry visas for Spanish Morocco and escape the Holocaust. He received the Medal of Freedom in 1946. Childs was later U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia. He wrote the textbook American Foreign Service (1948) and was an authority on 18th-century scholar and adventurer Giacomo Casanova.