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OTTAWA, ILLINOIS

—1925—

Marguerite’s legal case made the local news in Newark. It’s unlikely that the Radium Dial girls in Ottawa got to hear of it—but their employers certainly did. The radium industry was a small pond, and Radium Dial was one of the biggest fishes of them all.

By 1925, the studio in Ottawa had become the largest dial-painting plant in the country, supplying 4,300 dials a day. Business was booming—and Radium Dial wanted to take no chances of having a hold-up in their operations, such as their fellow radium corporation had suffered when the rumors first started in New Jersey.

Radium Dial now conceived a master plan to avoid the same problem. They opened a second dial-painting studio in Streator, sixteen miles south of Ottawa, where less was known about radium. Both plants ran simultaneously for nine months, but once it was apparent the Ottawa workers hadn’t heard the rumors from the east and weren’t going to quit, the firm shut down the second studio; some employees transferred to Ottawa, others simply lost their jobs.

The company also decided, just as USRC had done before them, to have their workers medically tested later in the year; the exams were conducted by a company doctor in Mr. Reed’s home on Post Street. Not all the women were tested; Catherine Wolfe was not among them. That was a shame, because just lately she had not been feeling too well. After two years of working at Radium Dial, she later remembered, “I began to feel pains in my left ankle, which spread up to my hip.”1 She’d started to limp just a little, every now and again, when that ache made itself known.

Another dial-painter who wasn’t tested was Della Harveston, who had been part of the original clique with Catherine, Charlotte and Mary Vicini, Ella Cruse, and Inez Corcoran. She had died the previous year of tuberculosis.

Red-haired Peg Looney, however, was summoned by Mr. Reed to his home for a test. Yet when her colleagues asked her how she’d got on, she had to tell them she hadn’t a clue. In Orange, the medical-exam results had been secretly shared with the company behind the women’s backs; in Ottawa, they went straight to the corporation and cut out the middle woman entirely. Neither Peg nor any of her tested coworkers were told the results. Peg settled back at her desk in the studio without worry, however, picking up her brush and licking her lips in preparation for painting. She wasn’t at all concerned; the company, she was sure, would tell her if anything was wrong.

All the girls in Ottawa still lip-pointed, little knowing that eight hundred miles away the practice had been banned. Yet behind the scenes at the head office of Radium Dial, its executives, mindful of the New Jersey lawsuit, now started putting some thought into finding an alternative method of applying the paint—just in case. Chamois was tested, but found too absorbent; rubber sponges were employed, but they didn’t work right. Radium Dial’s vice president Rufus Fordyce admitted, however, that their endeavors were somewhat halfhearted: “No strenuous effort,” he later acknowledged, “ha[s] been made to find and provide any suitable manner to eliminate the procedure.”2

The company eventually tasked Mr. Reed with the job of finding an alternative method. Soon, he would start tinkering with the idea of a glass pen, such as was employed by Swiss dial-painters, and he would begin to work up various designs. In the meantime, the Ottawa girls kept on. Lip… Dip… Paint.

Their fun times kept right on too. These days, many of them had a man on their arm as the young women started courting. Back in high school, Peg Looney’s favorite song had been the independent-minded “I Ain’t Nobody’s Darling,” but now she had changed her tune: she was stepping out with a bright young man called Chuck. Anyone with half a brain could see that any one of these days he was going to propose.

Chuck was his nickname; his full title was the much more distinguished-sounding Charles Hackensmith. He was a gorgeous, well-muscled, broad-shouldered, and tall young man with curling fair hair; his high-school yearbook said the phrase that defined him was: “And the cold marble athlete leaped to life.”3 Yet to be the beau of clever Peg Looney, you couldn’t be all brawn and no brain, and Chuck was as smart as could be: he made the Senior Honor Roll at high school and was a college guy. “He was big educated,” said Peg’s sister Jean. “He was everything. He was just elegant, really. Awful good.”4 He grew up living just around the block from Peg and her large family, and although he was now away at college, he came home on weekends—and that was when the young couple really let their hair down.

Chuck had a shack at his house, where he would throw parties and play records on his beat-up old gramophone. As spectators clapped along and drank illicit home-brewed root beer, the dancing would begin. Whenever Chuck hugged Peg to him, he left not an inch between them: two bodies pressed close as they danced to the latest jazz tunes. Chuck was flirtatious; this girl, he knew, was something special.

Everybody would go down to the Shack; Marie Becker would have a hoot there. She would zip about between friends if a party was taking place, encouraging everyone to attend. Marie was courting Patrick Rossiter, a laborer who had a large nose and big features, whom she’d met at the National Guard Armory while skating. He was “a devil,”5 said his family. “He used to like to have fun.”6 Catherine Wolfe, too, would attend as a good friend of Peg; she was single at that time. And all the Looneys would be there as well—“The whole family!” exclaimed Jean. “And there were ten of us!”7

There was so much happening in Ottawa in that spring of 1925 that the visit from the government inspector to the studio barely registered with the women. But that, of course, was just what Radium Dial wanted. In the wake of the New Jersey cases, a national investigation into industrial poisons had been launched by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which was based in the capital, Washington, DC. The bureau was run by Ethelbert Stewart; his agent on the ground was a man called Swen Kjaer. And when Kjaer met with Rufus Fordyce, Radium Dial’s vice president, ahead of coming to inspect the Ottawa studio, he was “requested to handle the subject carefully, so as not to cause an alarm among the workers.”8 Maybe as a result, only three girls would even be questioned.

Kjaer began his study in April 1925. He went first to the Chicago office of Radium Dial, where he interviewed Fordyce and some laboratory workers; Kjaer noticed the latter had lesions on their fingers. The lab workers acknowledged that radium was a dangerous material to handle “unless proper safeguards are provided.”9 Consequently, the men in Radium Dial’s laboratories were provided with them: Kjaer noted that operators were “well-protected by lead screens” and also given vacations from work to limit their exposure.

On April 20, Kjaer arrived in the little town of Ottawa for the studio inspection. His first port of call was to speak with Miss Murray, the superintendent.

“Why,” she told him, “[I] never heard of any illness which might in the slightest manner be caused by the work.” In fact, she went on, “Instead of proving detrimental to the health of the girls, [I] know of several who had seemingly derived benefit from it and showed decidedly physical improvement.”

Kjaer asked her about lip-pointing. She told him that the girls “had been admonished not to tip the brushes in the mouths without washing them carefully first in the water provided for such a purpose.” But she conceded, “Tipping in the mouth is constantly practiced.”

Kjaer could see that for himself as he toured the studio the same day. Every single girl there was lip-pointing; yet they were all, he noted, “healthy and vigorous.” On the day he toured the plant, he observed that the girls did have water on their desks in which they were cleaning their brushes—but later, when Fordyce supplied him with a photograph of the studio taken at a different time, Kjaer noticed that water was not in evidence on the tables.

As part of his inspection, Kjaer also interviewed Ottawa’s dentists to find out if they’d come across any extraordinary conditions of the mouth in their patients. In New Jersey, it had been Drs. Barry and Davidson who had first raised the alarm; should there be a problem in Ottawa too, it seemed logical that its dentists might be the first to know of it. And so he called on three different dentists on that April afternoon, including one who had the largest dental practice in town. That dentist took care of a number of the girls employed at the factory; he told Kjaer there had been “no evidence of malignant disorder.” He promised to notify the bureau promptly in case anything should turn up. The other dentists, too, gave the girls a clean bill of health. They took pains to state, in fact, that “there seemed to be very little dental trouble among those workers.”

Kjaer spent only three weeks on his national study—an incredibly short time given the size of the country and the potential gravity of the situation—before it was suddenly stopped. Kjaer’s boss, Ethelbert Stewart, later said of the decision: “Radium paints came to our attention in connection with our campaign against white phosphorus; phosphorus then was our chief interest and we found that it was not used in the elements which go into luminous paint.”10 The investigation had been but an offshoot of a wider study into industrial poison.

Yet there was another reason, too. Stewart later confessed, “I abandoned the inquiry not because I was convinced that no problem existed outside of the United States Radium Corporation, but because the expense of follow-up made it impossible for the Bureau to continue.”11

In those three short weeks, however, Kjaer had reached a conclusion. Radium, he determined, was dangerous.

It was just that nobody told the girls…