فصل 10

10

OTTAWA, ILLINOIS

—1923—

The caretaker at Radium Dial wiped his bare hands down his work shirt: he was covered in luminous material, his clothing stiff with it. The only clear spots on his face were where two big drools of chewing tobacco ran down his chin; he liked to chew as he worked—and he wasn’t the only one. The dial-painters kept candy on their desks, snacking between dials without washing their hands, a habit that suited the many teenagers employed. As time went on, the current Ottawa high-school students were among them; they would work “one summer between high-school years from a few to several weeks,”1 just to earn a bit of pocket money.

As in Orange, the girls encouraged friends and family to join them at the studio. The old high school was a lovely building to work in: a grand Victorian brick edifice with huge arched windows and high ceilings. Frances Glacinski was thrilled when her little sister Marguerite, two years younger, came along to work on the second floor with Catherine, Charlotte, Marie, Peg, and all the rest. Marguerite was a pretty girl who was described as “comely”2; she and her sister were of Polish heritage. The girls also welcomed fifteen-year-old Helen Munch, a thin, dark girl who wore scarlet lipstick and painted her nails to match; she was the kind of person who “wanted to be going all the time.”3

The exception to these teenagers was Pearl Payne, a married woman from nearby Utica. Pearl was twenty-three when she started at Radium Dial, a good eight years older than some of her colleagues. She had married Hobart Payne, a tall, slender electrician who wore glasses, in 1922; she described him as a “fine husband.”4 He was a man who told jokes and loved children; folks described him as a “very knowledgeable guy.”5

In fact, his wife was full of smarts too. Pearl was the eldest girl of thirteen children, and although she had to leave school at thirteen to earn money for the family, she revealed, “During my employment [I] attended night school and a private teacher, completing seventh [and] eighth grade and one year of high school.”6 And her education didn’t stop there: during the war she’d gained a nursing diploma and was all set to start a career at a Chicago hospital when her mother was taken ill; Pearl had quit to care for her. Now her mom had recovered, Pearl was returning to work—and dial-painting, which was better paid than being a nurse, was what she ended up doing.

Pearl and Catherine Wolfe got on especially well. Pearl was a gentle woman; “never an unkind word from her mouth, ever,”7 said her nephew Randy. The two women’s personalities dovetailed neatly, and their shared experience of nursing relatives—for Catherine took responsibility for her elderly aunt and uncle—brought them closer. Catherine, three years younger than Pearl, described her as a “dearest friend.”8 Funnily enough, the two women also looked alike: Pearl had thick dark hair and pale skin too, though she was rounder-faced and more full-figured than Catherine, and her hair was curly.

Pearl overlapped with Charlotte Nevins by only a few months. In the fall of 1923, Charlotte quit her job at Radium Dial to become a seamstress; she had been a dial-painter for only thirteen months. As had been the case in Orange, however, any time a girl left, a dozen more arrived to take her place; Olive West now joined the studio, becoming close with Catherine and Pearl. All were overseen by assistant superintendent Mr. Reed, Miss Murray’s deputy, with whom the girls often shared a joke. On his occasional forays into their studio, the dial-painters would tease him—and it was an affectionate repartee that cut both ways. One young woman remembered, “I was [to be] married and [I] remember going to work that morning in the dress and telling the supervisor, Reed, I was quitting and on my way to be married. He joked and said, ‘Don’t come back, you won’t have a job!’” But she concluded, “I was back at work in a couple of weeks.”9

As Mr. Reed was deaf, the girls would sometimes talk back to him as he couldn’t hear them, but it was all good-natured and they enjoyed working with him. “I never heard of any of them not getting along, never,” said Peg’s sister Jean. “Everybody was generous and good to one another.”10

It was such a lovely atmosphere that Peg Looney found herself falling for the job and forgetting all about her ambition to become a schoolteacher. She was extremely conscientious and would even take dials home to paint, carefully tracing the numerals in that cramped house next to the railroad tracks that she shared with her large family.

“She looked after us real good,”11 remembered her sister Jean of Peg sharing her good fortune with them. Another sister, Jane, recalled Peg buying her a gorgeous cobalt dress with decorative white trimmings: a typically generous gift on the occasion of Jane’s eighth-grade graduation. The sisters all agreed: “She was everything you’d hope a big sister would be.”12

Peg not only brought her wages and her work home, but also the games she learned at the studio. “She entertained the younger siblings with ‘Let’s go in the dark!’”13 revealed Peg’s niece Darlene. And there they would glow, a row of little Looneys with radium mustaches, shining sprites behind the blankets they’d put up for modesty in the tiny bedroom. Peg’s sister Catherine—the nearest to her in age—was enamored of all she saw and longed to join Peg at the studio, though she never did. Everyone wanted to work there.

That was why Pearl Payne was so disappointed when—after only eight months as a dial-painter—she had to leave to nurse her mother again. She was the kind of woman who wouldn’t have begrudged that for a second, and so she simply bade farewell to her friends and went back to Utica, where she remained even after her mother’s recovery, keeping house. She gave the studio little more thought as she turned her attention to her next dream: having a family with Hobart.

It meant she wasn’t there when, later in the 1920s, the Radium Dial bosses took a company photograph. All the girls—there were just over a hundred of them in attendance that day—filed outside to have their picture taken. The company men were there too; just Mr. Reed and his caretaking colleagues, not the executives from head office. The men sat cross-legged on the ground in front of the women, Mr. Reed donning a white flat hat and his usual dark bow tie. The girls ranged behind the men, some sitting on benches, others standing on the steps of the old high school: three rows of dial-painters, as jolly a bunch of girls as ever there was. Many had their hair bobbed short in the latest flapper style. They wore drop-waisted dresses embellished with long scarves and strings of pearls. “We used to wear our street dresses to the plant,”14 Catherine Wolfe said—but what street dresses they were.

Catherine sat on the front row, in the center of the picture, just to the right of Mr. Reed and Miss Murray. It was perhaps a sign of her seniority; as one of the longest-serving employees, she was now a trusted worker who would on occasion assume duties above and beyond dial-painting. That day, she wore a dark, mid-calf-length dress with a long necklace of black beads; her feet and hands, as they often were, were folded neatly together. She wasn’t like Marie Becker, who would broadly gesticulate as she made one joke or another.

Now, all the girls—the jokers and the quiet ones, the conscientious and the unconcerned—sat still for the photographer. Some hugged each other, or interlinked their arms. They sat close together, staring at the camera. And as the shutter closed, it captured them all together, frozen in time for just one moment. The girls of Radium Dial, outside their studio: forever young and happy and well.

On the photographic film, at least.