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All she wanted, Grace Fryer thought, as she flicked through the local paper, was a bit of good news. There had been only one piece of it so far in 1926. Miss Wiley’s new law, to her and the dial-painters’ delight, had been signed into being: radium necrosis was now formally a compensable disease. In many ways, it had been a lot easier to get it through than Wiley had anticipated.

Other than that, however, it had not been a great spring. Grace’s jaw problems had started back up again—she had now lost all but three teeth in her lower jaw and had to see Dr. McCaffrey three times a week—while her back was incredibly painful. She hadn’t had it looked at by a doctor in a while, though; it was too expensive. Nonetheless, despite her troubles, Grace still commuted daily to her office. She commented simply: “I feel better when I am working.”1 Indeed, she was said to meet people cheerfully in the bank.

Yet there was another reason to keep on with her job. Quinta remarked that Grace was working “so she won’t have to be a burden in her family.”2 Grace had incurred medical bills of some $2,000 ($26,800), and her parents certainly couldn’t cover them. Yet even if Grace put all her earnings, which were about $20 ($268) a week, toward her medical treatment, it would take her two years to pay what she owed. She had no idea where she might find the money…well, no idea but one. By now she had spent almost a year pursuing different attorneys, pretty much on her own, too. Faced with lawyer after lawyer turning down the case, the other girls seemed to have given up.

Albina was not at all well; she saw only close friends and was unable to leave the house due to her locked hips. James Larice did his best to put a smile on his wife’s face—“He cheers me up,” Albina said, “and says I’m a ‘good sport’”3—but it didn’t help. “I’m such a burden,”4 she cried despondently. Although her sister Quinta carried on resignedly, her disability was progressing too: the “white shadow” now showed in both her legs, while Knef could do nothing to save her teeth.

As for Katherine Schaub, nobody even saw her anymore: she stayed at home and refused to go out. “While other girls are going to dances and the theatres and courting and marrying for love,” Katherine said mournfully, “I have to remain here and watch painful death approach. I am so lonely.”5 She left the house only to attend church. While Katherine had not been especially religious before, she now pronounced, “You don’t know what a consolation I obtain from going to mass.”6 As she was now unable to work, her medical bills fell to her family. Her father, William, who was in his mid-sixties, did his utmost to help, but Katherine’s sister confided, “It’s pretty hard on Dad. He can’t work like he used to.”7

As time went on, despite these crippling bills, the girls started to doubt that a lawsuit was the right way to go. Perhaps it wasn’t fair to blame the company? For Katherine had eventually consulted Dr. Flinn—and his “unbias opinion”8 was that “radium could not and had not harmed her.”9 Katherine, naturally, told the other women this; and that got them confused. As Albina put it, “[We] all thought it significant that of the several doctors who treated [us], only one doctor, Dr. Martland, had informed [us] that [our] illnesses were due to radioactive substances.”10 With the women in bad health and a question now raised over the company’s culpability, a lawsuit was the last thing on their minds.

The last thing on the other girls’ minds, maybe—but it remained a high priority for Grace Fryer. Still reading the local newspaper, she turned the pages slowly, deep in thought. And then, to her astonishment, she noticed a small piece buried within the paper. Scarcely able to believe her eyes, she read: SUITS ARE SETTLED IN RADIUM DEATHS.11

What? She quickly read on—and found the headline did not lie. USRC had settled out of court the suits of Marguerite Carlough, Sarah Maillefer, and Hazel Kuser. The women had beaten the corporation—got money for what the firm had done to them. Grace could barely believe it. Surely that was an admission of guilt? Surely this opened the door for her and her friends to bring a lawsuit? She read on in excitement: “Mr. Carlough [the girls’ father] received $9,000 [$120,679] for the death of Marguerite Carlough and $3,000 [$40,226] for the death of Mrs. Maillefer, and Mr. Kuser received $1,000 [$13,408] for the death of his [wife].”12

It was hardly big money. Theo Kuser’s settlement, in particular, barely dented the $8,904 (almost $120,000) debts that he and his father had incurred for Hazel’s care—especially once Mr. Kalitsch took his 45 percent cut. This was a higher-than-usual split with the attorney, but the families did not have much choice but to agree, for he had been the only lawyer to take the case. In the end, Theo was left with just $550 ($7,300), but it was better than nothing.

Grace wondered what on earth had happened to make the company pay out, when it had fought the women for almost eighteen months with no sign that it would concede a single cent. In fact, behind the scenes at USRC, there were probably several reasons—not least of which was that the women, especially the Carlough sisters, had strong cases; the company might well have lost before a sympathetic jury. Even looked at from a basic legal perspective, the cases were promising: the girls had filed within the two-year statute; there was Katherine Wiley’s new law supporting the girls’ claims that they had been killed by such a thing as radium necrosis; and there was also the issue of the Drinker report. Sarah had still been employed by USRC at the time the firm had chosen to suppress it; if it came out that the company had received information that could have saved her—or at the very least mitigated the harm caused—and hadn’t acted upon it, it would look very bad indeed.

Grace was galvanized into action: this was the good news she’d been waiting for. She got back in touch with lawyer Henry Gottfried, and just two days after she’d read about the settlements, the wheels of her own claim were set in motion. On May 6, 1926, USRC received the following message from Gottfried: “Gentlemen, unless you communicate with me relative to [Miss Fryer’s] claim for damages on or before Monday, May 10th, 1926, I will be compelled to institute suit.”13

USRC, like clockwork, immediately referred the matter to their attorney Stryker, who seemingly asked Gottfried to name a number. On June 8, Gottfried wrote to say that Grace would be willing to settle for $5,000 ($67,000).

It wasn’t a gigantic sum of money; it would cover the extensive medical bills that Grace had already run up, plus provide a nest egg to pay the future expenses that would undoubtedly be required. Grace wasn’t a greedy person, and she didn’t really want to start a big lawsuit. If the company would simply make her a fair offer, she was prepared to take that compensation and be done.

USRC took just one week to respond. “I have your letter of the 8th,” Stryker replied on June 15, “and note your suggestion. I cannot advise my client to adopt it.”14 The company “refused to do anything for Miss Fryer without suit.”15

Grace’s heart must have sunk when she heard. She must have been confused, too. For not only had the company agreed to pay out damages to her former colleagues just the month before, but Miss Wiley had put that new law in place. Didn’t that change anything?

But, it now transpired, it did not. And here it became clear just why Wiley had had such an easy ride getting the radium-necrosis bill passed. For a start, the bill could not be applied retroactively, so no one injured before 1926 could claim. Also, as the new amendment became part of the existing law, it automatically had a five-month statute of limitations attached, a length of time that would never be long enough for radium poisoning to become evident in any dial-painter. Finally, and most crucially of all, it covered only radium necrosis—specifically jaw necrosis, of the aggressive kind suffered by Mollie Maggia and Marguerite Carlough. None of the other medical conditions arising from the women’s poisoning—their life-sapping anemia, bad backs, locked hips, broken thighs, even simply their loosening teeth—was compensable. Wiley had found that the new bill was “not unpopular”16 with the state Manufacturers’ Association; now, suddenly, it became obvious why. The law, as written, was drafted so that no one would ever collect compensation.

Wiley soon realized her mistake. With renewed fervor, the Consumers League began campaigning to get radium poisoning into the law books. Tellingly, however, this fight would take them much, much longer before any changes were made—far too long, and far too late, to help Grace Fryer, sitting despondently at home in Orange in June 1926.

There may have been another reason the company wasn’t inclined to settle: there is some evidence to suggest that the firm was not doing quite as well as it once had financially; one executive referred to the situation as being “hand to mouth.”17 Part of the problem was finding staff; its remaining employees were “jumpy and nervous”18 and new workers scarce. Before the year was out, USRC would cut its losses and shut down the Orange plant, putting the site up for sale. Even so, it wasn’t down-and-out completely. The firm simply transferred operations to New York.

Grace Fryer wasn’t down-and-out either, although USRC’s response led to a double blow as, learning of the firm’s refusal to settle, Gottfried dropped her case. Yet she felt more determined than ever to battle on; she was her father’s daughter, and this child of a union delegate would not back down so easily from a fight against a guilty firm. “I feel we girls should not give up all hope,”19 she said.

She went on to consult at least two other lawyers—but, frustratingly, without success. Part of her problem was that her former company, just as it had planned, was now beginning to benefit from expert publications that said radium poisoning was not to blame for the girls’ illnesses. The most high-profile of these, which would be published in December 1926, was authored by one Dr. Flinn.

“An industrial hazard does not exist in the painting of luminous dials,”20 he wrote plainly. He said the girls’ problems were due to a bacterial infection. Hoffman dubbed the report “more bias than science.”21

Yet it went way beyond bias: Flinn was lying through his teeth. For not only did his published conclusions contradict his stated opinion to Dr. Drinker—“I cannot but feel that the paint is to blame for the girls’ conditions”22—but in June 1926, six months before his study was published, Flinn finally discovered two radium-poisoning cases at the Waterbury Clock Company. These proved, once and for all, that it wasn’t a bacterial infection that had been passed around a single studio: it was the women’s profession that had killed them.

Despite knowing of the cases for so long, Flinn didn’t correct or withdraw his report and allowed it to be printed, giving USRC published expert evidence to draw on in their continued denial of responsibility. Later, Flinn did say that he regretted that decision. But from his future behavior, one can infer, not too much…

Flinn wasn’t finished with the Orange girls, despite his proclamation that their illnesses were only an infection. In July 1926, the month after USRC turned down Grace’s attempt at a settlement, he finagled his way into examining Grace herself; the timing was probably a coincidence. Flinn—accompanied by another man who Grace did not know—took her blood and an x-ray. And when the results were in, Flinn pronounced with a smile, “Your blood picture [is] better than mine!”23

“He told me,” Grace later remembered, “I was in better health than he was and there was nothing wrong with me.”24

But that was not what Grace’s body told her.

The girls were all in dire straits that summer, notwithstanding Flinn’s assertions of good health to Grace, Katherine, and Edna Hussman. Quinta McDonald was still attending Dr. Knef for her loosening teeth; and it was Knef, now, who chose to make an appointment with the radium company. One morning during that summer of 1926, he met with the board of directors, including President Roeder and an up-and-coming vice president called Clarence B. Lee, at the USRC headquarters in New York. Knef was at his wits’ end from trying to treat the women, and he now made the radium firm an offer he hoped they couldn’t refuse.

“If you will play ball with me,” Knef told the gathered executives, “I will play ball with you people. Get [me] a list, the names of the girls, [and] I will keep my mouth shut as long as I can. Quite a few cases will just die a natural death. I can hold these girls off for four or five years… There are my cards on the table. I have to be compensated somewhere.”25

Knef wasn’t at his wits’ end in sympathy for his patients, mind you, but because he wanted to be paid. Perhaps it was the Carlough settlements that had set him off; he was itching to be remunerated for all the free treatment he had given: “Took it all out of my own pocket!” he now exclaimed in vexation. His appeal to the company for payment might have been fair enough—after all, their paint had caused the sicknesses for which he had treated the women—but this scheme he was now presenting, of lying to the girls, of letting them die in ignorance to protect the firm, went way beyond being paid what he was owed. All loyalty to the girls had vanished.

“What is your proposition?” asked the executives, seemingly intrigued.

“I told Mr. Roeder I ask $10,000 [$134,000]. I don’t think I ask one cent too much.”

USRC gave due consideration to his offer. “Are you sure that all these girls will come to you?”

“I believe now that the majority will come to me,” Knef replied, confident that the women saw him as a friend.

“Would you tell them that [your services were] being paid for by the company?”

“I won’t tell them that I have any connection with you people,” Knef said with a smile.

Perhaps encouraged by the positive way the meeting was unfolding, Knef now made another suggestion. “If you people want me,” he said, leaning forward on the boardroom desk to stress his point, “I can get up on the stand and testify… ‘Do you believe that this girl is troubled with radioactivity?’ I’d have to say no. I can [say] whatever I want to believe; [the] moon is made of blue cheese!”

“You can make it go one way or the other, can you?” asked the executives.

“I could if I wanted to; that is, if I am working for you people. It [is] customary for experts to testify for the people who pa[y] them.”

The money was all-important to Knef. And here, perhaps, he made a fatal error. This dentist from Newark, who had worked his whole life only in dentistry, now tried to play it tough with the big boys of big business. “I am going to get this one way or the other,” he said threateningly. “Do you want me as a friend or do you want me as an enemy? If I can’t come to an agreement with you people, I am going to sue these people [the girls; then] they will have to sue [you] to get the money. Fair warning: when I fight, I fight ferocious as a lion. I am a very valuable man to be with you.”

That had gone well, he must have thought. He must have smiled with his next line, confident that he had them on a hook. “I am going to be as reasonable with you as I can. I am not here to gouge you or bleed you or anything else.”

The executives summed up the position: “Unless we pay you $10,000, you are in a position to make a lot of trouble for us. If we do pay it, you will help us.”

“I can help you, yes,” said the dentist eagerly.

Another director spoke up. “The future by itself [i.e., Knef getting paid for treating the girls in future, and holding them at bay from filing suit] is not sufficient? You must get the $10,000?”

“As I tell you,” said Knef cockily, “I must have my compensation.”

He had blown it. He may not have known, either, that the corporation already had Dr. Flinn in place, doing such fine work for them. Roeder stood up swiftly, ready to dismiss him. “Your proposition is immoral,” he declared. “We will have nothing whatever to do with it.”

“Immoral, is it?” echoed Knef. “Is that final?”

It seemed it was.

When evidence of his proposition came out, down the line, USRC would take the moral high ground for the fact that they had sent the dentist packing.

The meeting had lasted for fifty-five minutes exactly.