In the past couple of months, Paulette Dorflaufer has earned a lot of new fans.
It all started when the 82-year-old crossing guard was noticed by Ollie McAteer, a Brit living in New Jersey who has an account dedicated to reasons why he loves living in the Garden State. (As a fellow New Jerseyan, I must agree!)
Driving through Livingston, New Jersey, McAteer found the crossing guard of 20 years outfits impossible to ignore — the fur coat, the fascinator, the obvious flare. “Who is this crossing guard diva?” he wondered in a video that has since gone viral.
“We must know her story,” he rightfully declared.
That story turned out to be more amazing than anything McAteer could have imagined. With her perfect romance heroine name, Paulette Dorflaufer has the most fascinating of life stories.
Paulette was born in Nazi-occupied France to a Jewish family, the youngest of 10 children. While the rest of her family was taken to concentration camps — her parents and five of her siblings perished in Auschwitz — a needed hospital stay for the toddler saved her from that fate. She ended up in an orphanage in Marseille and was eventually adopted by an American Jewish couple from South Orange, New Jersey, at age 4. That couple has lost their biological daughter in a sledding accident.
“When I was adopted, the orphanage gave me a white rabbit-fur coat and a white rabbit-fur muff, and I guess I never forgot it,” Paulette told the Washington Post. Paulette now has over 13 fur coats, which she rotates for her crossing guard duty. The mother of three and grandmother of seven (and a soon-to-be great-grandma!) got the job to be close to her granddaughter, who used to go to the elementary school where she’s now a crossguard.
While she doesn’t remember her native tongue of French, she always kept a keen French sense of style.
Paulette only discovered her family story as an adult. She went to dental school, became a dental assistant, met her husband and started a family. She only discovered she was French in 1965, and it would be six more years before a home decorator she hired would help her make contact with her family. She found a first cousin, who told her she had two living sisters in Paris and a brother in Marseilles. She discovered that her surviving French family had never stopped looking for her and met with them the following year. While her sisters have since passed away, Paulette, her children and grandchildren are still in touch with her French birth family.
Paulette is clearly a woman who loves to reinvent herself. She’s worked many jobs — a hand model, a teacher’s aide, a cosmetician at the mall — and every day, the kids she helps shepherd through the crosswalk love guessing what color Miss Paulette will wear today — a vibrant pink outfit? A calming shade of blue? Paulette puts her heart into what she wears, from scarves to rings to floral and butterfly pins to her vibrant nails. She may no longer speak French, but she’s full of joie de vivre.
When asked by her granddaughter Rachel online what her life motto would be, Paulette replied that the most important thing was to have “a lot of love and caring and understanding with each other.”
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