فصل 23

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OTTAWA, ILLINOIS

—1926—

The bells of St. Columba pealed out joyously across Ottawa. A wedding seemed to happen every other week these days as the dial-painters got married; many were bridesmaids for each other. Frances Glacinski married John O’Connell, a laborer; Mary Duffy wed a carpenter called Francis Robinson. Marie Becker got engaged to Patrick Rossiter; Mary Vicini courted Joseph Tonielli; and Peg Looney and Chuck Hackensmith eventually made plans to marry in June 1930. Charlotte Nevins—who hadn’t worked for Radium Dial since 1923—was also one of those falling head over heels; she was still in touch with lots of the girls and told them excitedly of the charms of Albert Purcell. They’d met at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago dancing; Charlotte knew exactly how to swivel as she showed off her Charleston, and in so doing she caught the eye of Al, a laborer from Canada. “They were best friends,”1 revealed a close relative; within two short years, Charlotte Nevins became the latest bride walking down the aisle of St. Columba.

The church where many of these weddings took place was a white stone building with a gray slate roof and a beautiful altar that was the envy of the region—it was imitation marble and filled the whole space. St. Columba was fairly narrow, but its arched ceiling was so much higher than the building was wide that the effect was breathtaking. One of its few parishioners not caught up in this maelstrom of marriage was Catherine Wolfe. A young man at church had caught her eye, however: his name was Thomas Donohue.

He was thirty-one to Catherine’s twenty-three. Tom was a diminutive man with bushy eyebrows and a thatch of dark hair; he had a mustache and wire-frame glasses. He did a variety of jobs, including engineer and painter, a rather apt parallel to Catherine, as the dial-painters were listed as “artists” in the town directory, in a nod to the glamour of their work. Later in life, Tom would labor in a local glass factory, Libbey-Owens, where he worked alongside Al Purcell and Patrick Rossiter.

He was a “real quiet man who never talked much.”2 That may have been due to his upbringing, for Tom came from a large Irish-immigrant family. As a relative said: “He was the sixth of seven kids; he was never gonna get much word in.”3 The whole family grew up on the Donohue farm, which was based in Wallace township, just north of Ottawa, one of those places where you could see forever across the fertile fields and the sky seemed to swallow you up. Like Catherine, who said a rosary every day with her own set of beads, Tom was highly devout, so much so that he’d attended an all-male Catholic school with the idea that he might join the priesthood, but that didn’t come to be. Tom worshipped at St. Columba, just as Catherine did; his grandfather had paid for one of the stained-glass windows when the church was built. The Donohues didn’t come into town that often, though: “People didn’t travel as much in them days as they do now,” remarked Tom’s nephew James. “If you went to town more than once a week, you were a big shot.”4

Tom Donohue was definitely not a big shot; he was “not an extrovert in any way.”5 He was, in fact, just like Catherine. “They were both very quiet people,” said their niece Mary. “Very shy people.”6

Perhaps that was partly why they wouldn’t marry until 1932.

It is possible that Catherine told her deskmate at Radium Dial, Inez Corcoran, about Tom. Inez had her own story to share, for she was engaged to Vincent Lloyd Vallat, the proprietor of a gas-filling station; they were due to marry later that year.

Not all the married dial-painters quit their jobs. It seems the studio didn’t want to lose its highly skilled workers, so the company became a pioneer in offering part-time terms to working moms. “I quit ten, twelve times,” one girl recalled. “They always took me back; it took too long to train new ones.”7 The company needed to retain its best girls because business was still booming—and how. Westclox hit a new production high of 1.5 million luminous watches in 1926, and Radium Dial painted all of them.

The new husbands noticed something strange in their households when their wives came home from work. One later wrote, “I remember when we were married and she hung her smock in the bedroom: it would shine like the northern lights. The first time I saw it, it gave me an eerie feeling—like a ghost was bouncing around on the wall.”8

Like someone else was in the room with them, just watching and waiting for the right time to strike.

There was no indication that the good times were ever going to end. No Ottawa women had fallen ill; one worker had a “face [that] broke out in blotches”9 while another said, “I quit because I was sick to my stomach,”10 but these complaints were nothing to do with the work. Another woman, who had left the studio at the end of 1925, did have “terrible, excruciating pain in my hip socket,”11 but it went away. “Though we had several doctors,” she recalled, “it never was diagnosed.”12 She never went back to Radium Dial but, she said, “I had friends who worked there for many years with no bad effects.”13

Notwithstanding the lack of bad effects, however, the company executives had not forgotten the downturn in business suffered by their competitor in New Jersey—and they doubtless noted with concern the settlements USRC had been forced to pay out. Mr. Reed’s invention of his glass pen had duly been supplied to the workforce, albeit with no explanation as to why. The girls knew nothing of what was happening out east. The news piece about Marguerite Carlough’s case was hidden inside a local paper eight hundred miles away. Dr. Martland’s radical study from the year before was hotly debated…but only in the specialist medical press. Although his findings were reported by the general media of New York and New Jersey, such findings barely caused a ripple in the Great Lakes of the Midwest. Girls who lived in Ottawa didn’t read the New York Times.

To be fair to Radium Dial, therefore, they didn’t have to implement the change. The girls were not laying down their brushes in protest, and it wasn’t as though there was any outside pressure to alter the working practices. For despite the national study by Swen Kjaer, with his conclusion that radium dial-painting was hazardous, and despite the medical studies now being published that said the same, no organization had intervened on the national stage to prevent workers beyond Orange from being harmed.

But although Radium Dial introduced glass pens, which were intended to put a stop to lip-pointing, it doesn’t appear that they were fit for use. Perhaps the firm rushed them out in a panic. From the girls’ perspective, they were not a runaway success; Catherine Wolfe thought them “awkward”14 and “clumsy to handle.”15 And because the brushes weren’t removed when the pens were launched, the dial-painters continued to lip-point to clean up the runovers—runovers that were now plentiful due to the clumsiness of the new instruments.

The girls conceded, “We were watched very closely at first to see that we didn’t try to go back to the brush,”16 but it was a watchfulness that didn’t last long: “Supervisor wasn’t too observant,”17 another girl later said.

Using brushes instead of pens to paint the dials was supposed to be a dismissible offense, but it wasn’t a rule that was upheld. One girl recalled that she and six or seven others got a little behind in their work because of the inefficiency of the glass instruments, so one day decided to catch up using brushes. They were fired by Mr. Reed, who saw them do it, but this girl “went back right away, apologized; she was reinstated, as were the other girls at a later date.”18

Gradually, after just a few months, the glass pens fell out of use. Catherine Wolfe remarked: “We had our choice to use the glass pencil or Jap art brushes, whichever we found the most efficient to use.”19 Well, if that was the criterion, there was no contest. Some commentators later criticized the women for returning to the brush: “Those who were greedy,” one wrote, “and profited from it would do it the fastest way and the fastest way to make perfect numbers was to use the mouth.”20 But the girls were paid by piecework, not salary, so the impact of using the pens made a huge difference financially.

Of course, they were not the only ones to profit from the choice they made: Radium Dial benefited too. And although Mr. Reed had been tasked with inventing the pen, once it became clear it didn’t work, the company relaxed its rules and allowed the girls to go back to lip-pointing without further intervention. After all, with 1926 bringing that new Westclox production high, it was hardly the ideal time for the firm to insist on a new method of production, particularly one that was so ineffectual.

“The company left it up to us whether we used glass brushes or not,” Catherine Wolfe remembered. “I preferred the hair brushes, as the others were awkward. I didn’t think there was any danger in placing the brush in my mouth.”21

So she and Inez and Ella Cruse—another of the original girls—still lipped and dipped all day throughout that year of 1926. Catherine pointed the brush on every single number she did.

Toward the end of the year, she laid down her brush to say a special good-bye to her friend Inez, who worked beside her; it was her colleague’s last day on the job before a very special event. On Wednesday, October 20, 1926, Inez Corcoran married Vincent Lloyd Vallat. Together, the happy couple stood at the altar and made their solemn vows—vows that would see them through their future: through every dream, every day, every delightful thing to come.

Their voices echoed lightly round the cool church walls. “Until death do us part…”