فصل 24

24

ORANGE, NEW JERSEY

—1927—

Grace Fryer limped into Dr. Humphries’s office, trying not to cry out with pain. Humphries was shocked at the change in Grace; he hadn’t treated her for some time. She had been sent to him by Dr. Martland, who said she was “in rather a serious condition on account of her spine.”1

Dr. Martland and Dr. Hoffman had both tried to help her, Grace mused, as Humphries ushered her straight to radiology for a new x-ray. Hoffman in particular, she thought, had been very kind. Seeing a sharp deterioration in her health, he had written to President Roeder on her behalf, to appeal to him to help Grace “in a spirit of fairness and justice.”2

Hoffman was surprised by USRC’s response: “Mr. Roeder is no longer connected with this corporation.”3

It seems the firm hadn’t appreciated being put in the position of having to settle lawsuits. Roeder’s fingerprints were all over the company’s questionable handling of the Drinker report, and perhaps it was felt it was best all round if he moved on to pastures new. He had resigned in July 1926. While no longer the public face of the company, he remained a director on the board.

Despite the change at the top, the company’s attitude toward its stricken former employees hadn’t changed one bit. The incoming president, Clarence B. Lee, immediately rejected Hoffman’s appeal for assistance. When Hoffman wrote to Grace to let her know, he added: “You must take legal action at once.”4

Well, Grace thought, she was trying. Despite her poor health, she had not stopped looking for a lawyer and was even now waiting to hear back from a firm the bank had passed her on to. In the meantime, she had come to see Humphries to find out what was wrong with her back.

It is difficult to imagine how she might have reacted to the news he had to share. “X-rays taken at that time,” Humphries later said, “showed a crushing of the vertebrae.”5

Grace’s very spine had been shattered by the radium. In her foot, meanwhile, there was “destruction of the entire”6 affected bone through “crushing and thinning.”7 It must have been agonizing to endure.

“Radium eats the bone,” an interview with Grace later said, “as steadily and surely as fire burns wood.”8

Humphries could do nothing but try to find ways to make life more comfortable for her; ways to help her live her life. And so, on January 29, 1927, he fitted Grace Fryer, then twenty-seven, with a solid steel back brace. It extended from her shoulders to her waist and was held in place by two crossbars of steel; she had to wear it every single day and was permitted to take it off for only two minutes at a time. It was a demanding schedule of treatment, but she had no choice but to follow her doctor’s orders. She later confided, “I can hardly stand up without it.”9 She wore a brace on her foot, too, and some days she felt the braces were the only things keeping her together, helping her to carry on.

She needed them more than ever when, on March 24, she finally heard back from the latest set of lawyers: “We regret to say that in our opinion the Statute of Limitations barred your right of action against [USRC] two years after you left the[ir] employ.”10

It was another dead end.

Grace had just one final card to play. “[Dr. Martland] agrees with me,” Hoffman had written, “that it is of the utmost importance that you should take legal steps at once. [H]e suggests that you see the firm [Potter & Berry].”11

She had nothing more to lose; she had everything to gain. Grace Fryer, now aged twenty-eight, with a broken back and a broken foot and a disintegrating jaw, made an appointment with the firm for Tuesday, May 3, 1927. Maybe this Raymond H. Berry would be able to help where no other attorney had.

There was only one way to find out.

Grace dressed carefully for the appointment. This was make-or-break time. She’d had to change her wardrobe after the brace had been fitted. “It’s awfully hard,” she revealed, “to get clothes that don’t make it show. I can’t wear the sort of dresses I used to wear at all.”12

She styled her short dark hair smartly, then checked her appearance in the mirror. Grace was used to dealing daily with well-to-do clients at the bank; she knew from experience that first impressions count.

And it seems her potential new lawyers appreciated that sentiment too. Potter & Berry, despite being a small law firm, had its offices in the Military Park Building, one of Newark’s earliest skyscrapers; it was then the tallest building in the whole of New Jersey and had been completed only the year before. The lawyer she was meeting inside it, Grace soon realized as he introduced himself, was just as fresh-faced as his office.

Raymond Herst Berry was a youthful lawyer, not even in his thirties. Yet his baby-faced good looks—he had blond hair and blue eyes—belied a brain as sharp as a tack. He was not long out of Yale and had previously graduated from the Blair Academy as valedictorian of his class; already, he was a junior partner in the firm. He had served his clerkship at none other than Lindabury, Depue & Faulks, USRC’s legal firm, and perhaps that experience gave him some insider knowledge. Berry took a lengthy statement from Grace. And it seems she may have shared her new lead with her friends; for just three days later, Katherine Schaub also called on Berry.

He was not a man to jump into things. As any lawyer should, he first scrutinized the girls’ claims. Berry went to Martland’s lab, and interviewed von Sochocky; he then summoned Grace and Katherine back to his office on May 7. He had conducted his initial investigation, he told them, and he had seen enough. And then Raymond Berry took their case. He was a married man with three young daughters—a fourth would be born the following year—and perhaps having so many girls influenced his decision. Berry had also registered to fight as a soldier in the global conflict of the previous decade; and this case, he could see, would be one hell of a war. In his agreed terms with Katherine, Berry contracted to take the then-standard split of one-third of any compensation. With Grace, however, she seems to have negotiated him down to just a quarter.

Berry’s tack-sharp brain had been working hard on the statute-of-limitations question. His theory was this: the girls could not possibly have brought a lawsuit until they knew that the company was to blame. As the firm had actively conducted a campaign to mislead the girls, it should not be allowed to rely upon the delay, which it had caused, as a defense. After all, due to the misdirection, the girls’ certain knowledge came only with Martland’s formal diagnosis in July 1925. In Berry’s view, therefore, the two-year clock did not start ticking until that moment.

It was now May 1927. They were just in time.

With not a moment to lose, Berry began preparations for a lawsuit. Grace’s case would be the first to be filed; perhaps because she had been the first to call on him, or maybe because she was stronger than Katherine in terms of her mental health. She was also—in Hoffman’s words—“a very estimable person employed by one of [Newark’s] largest business corporations.”13 Berry may well have known that USRC’s lawyers would be looking for any chink in their armor, and Grace’s good character stood them all in good stead. Thus on May 18, 1927, Grace’s formal complaint was filed against the radium firm.

It made for uncomfortable reading—for USRC. Berry charged that they had “carelessly and negligently”14 put Grace at risk so that her body “became impregnated with radioactive substances”15 which “continually attack and break down the plaintiff’s tissues…causing great pain and suffering.”16 And he concluded: “Plaintiff demands $125,000 [$1.7 million] damages on the first count.”17

There were two counts included. In total, Grace was suing her former firm for a cool $250,000 ($3.4 million).

They kind of had it coming.

From the very start, Grace’s case attracted heart-rending headlines that supported her cause: HER BODY WASTING, SHE SUES EMPLOYER: WOMAN APPEARS IN COURT WITH STEEL FRAME TO HOLD HER ERECT declared the Newark Evening News after Grace’s first appearance in court to file the papers.18 And such coverage—combined with the friendship networks of the girls—soon led to other dial-painters coming forward. Quinta McDonald was one, with her sister Albina beside her.

And with these married women, Berry now launched lawsuits not only for them, but also for their husbands. As Berry wrote in legal papers for Quinta’s partner: “James McDonald lost the services of his wife and will in the future be deprived of the comfort and aid of her society and will be compelled to expend large sums of money in an endeavor to treat and cure his wife. Plaintiff James McDonald demands $25,000 [$341,000].”19

Adding the husbands to the lawsuits wasn’t an excessive gesture—the truth was that it was increasingly impossible for Quinta to be the wife and mother she wanted to be. She admitted: “I do what housework I can nowadays. Of course, I can’t do much. I can’t bend over now.”20 Given her extreme disability, she and James had recently been forced to hire a housekeeper—another expense.

Her sister Albina was in dire need of aid too. Her left leg was now four inches shorter than her right, leaving her crippled and bedridden. She and James had not given up on their dream of a family, but she had since suffered a miscarriage, leaving her feeling worse than ever. “Life,” Albina said dully, “is empty for me and my husband.”21

And there was someone else who was suffering. Edna Hussman had been released from her yearlong sentence in her plaster cast, but her ailments continued: her left leg shrank by three inches; her right shoulder became so stiff it was impossible for her to use her arm; and her blood tests showed she was anemic. When her mother had died, in December 1926, her spirits darkened further.

Yet Edna had hope. Hadn’t that company doctor, Dr. Flinn, told her she was in perfect health? She took the prescribed drugs for her anemia and followed her doctors’ orders. And then, one night in May 1927, as she groped in the dark for her medicine on the bureau, she caught sight of herself in a mirror. At first, she might have wondered if it was her mother Minnie returned from the grave to haunt her. For in the dead of night, in the dead of dark, a ghost girl glowed in the mirror.

Edna screamed and fainted. For she knew exactly what her shining bones foretold, shimmering through her skin. She knew that glow. Only one thing on earth could make that glimmer. Radium.

She went back to Dr. Humphries and told him what she’d seen, how much pain she was in. And there at the Orange Orthopedic Hospital, she said, “I heard Dr. Humphries talking with another doctor. He told the doctor I was suffering from radium poisoning. That is the first I knew of it.”22

Edna was a “peaceful and resigned woman.”23 She later said, “I’m religious. Perhaps that is why I’m not angry at anyone for what has occurred.”24 But that didn’t mean she didn’t feel it was unjust. She went on, “[I] feel that someone should have warned us. None of us knew that paint paste was dangerous; we were only girls: fifteen, seventeen, and nineteen years old.”25 Maybe that innate sense of injustice was why, in June 1927, only a month after receiving her diagnosis, Edna and Louis Hussman made their way to Raymond Berry.

There were five of them now: five girls crying out for justice; five girls fighting for their cause. Grace, Katherine, Quinta, Albina, and Edna. The newspapers went mad, inventing memorable monikers to define this new quintet. And so, in the summer of 1927, it became official.

The Case of the Five Women Doomed to Die had now begun.