Germaine was walking through a main part of the city and there was a huge commotion downtown that she thought she should check out. It turned out, it was a meeting where someone was trying to sell the American Dream and get people to move to America. She walked in and listened to the meeting, she was the only woman in the room. She thought that moving to America would be a really good change in her life, so she brought the idea back to her husband and they consulted the whole family before finalizing the decision and making arrangements to leave.

For her whole life, Germaine's parents owned Le Café de Lyon, a restaurant right next to the town train station. She was very strong minded as a child and she knew that she would NOT run a restaurant when she was older, she would do things her own way. By the time she was a teenager, she knew exactly what she wanted to be: a lawyer. However, her father told her that as a female lawyer, she would never be hired because women in that era were discouraged from doing a "man's profession". She made the decision to put off that dream and just settle for her high school diploma.