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OTTAWA, ILLINOIS

—August 1927—

Ella Cruse slammed the screen door of her house on Clinton Street and made her way down the few steps outside. She called good-bye to her mom Nellie as she went—but her voice was not as spirited as it once had been.

Ella didn’t know what was wrong with her. She had always been “strong and robust”1 before, but now she felt tired all the time. She started walking to work, taking her bearings, as always, from the spire of St. Columba, which was only a block or two from her home. Ella and her family—mom Nellie, dad James, and little brother John—regularly attended services at the Catholic church, like most everybody she worked with.

Nellie’s reply to her as she said good-bye had been quiet too; but then her mom disapproved of Ella being a dial-painter. “I never wanted Ella to work there,” she used to say, shaking her head, “but [it’s] a clean place and they’re a jolly bunch of girls.”2

Clinton Street was only a couple of blocks from the art studio too, so even with her new snail-pace gait, Ella was soon there. She made her way up the school steps with all the other girls arriving for work. There was Catherine Wolfe, walking with that slight limp she’d recently developed; Marie Becker, talking—as ever—a mile a minute; Mary Vicini, Ruth Thompson, and Sadie Pray. Peg Looney was already at her desk when Ella entered the studio, as conscientious as always. Ella said hello to them all; she was “a popular young woman.”3

In 1927, Mary Ellen Cruse (as she’d been christened by her parents) was twenty-four, the same age as Catherine Wolfe. Her glossy chestnut hair was cut into a fashionable bob, which ended daringly short at her cheekbones; it was finished with a dramatic fringe that swept across her flawless skin. She wore her eyebrows neatly plucked and had a shy smile that brought out a dimple in her left cheek.

She settled at her wooden desk and picked up her brush. Lip… Dip… Paint. It was a familiar routine by now, as she’d started working there when she was about twenty—she worked twenty-five days a month, eight hours a day, with no paid vacations.

Boy, she felt like taking a holiday now, though. She was tired and run-down, and her jaw felt sore. It made no sense; she was in excellent health normally. Ella had started seeing a doctor about six months back, but even though she’d gone to a couple of different physicians, none had been able to help. It was just like Peg Looney; she’d had a tooth pulled recently, but she said her dentist couldn’t make it heal.

Ella looked up as she heard Mr. Reed come into their room, watching as he paced up and down on one of his infrequent inspections. He had a certain swagger to his walk these days—but why wouldn’t he? He now ran the joint: the superintendent at last, ever since Miss Murray had died of cancer back in July. Ella turned her attention back to her dials. No time to waste.

It was hard work today, though. All that summer she had complained of pains in her hands and legs, and it was tough to keep up with the delicate painting when her knuckles were so sore. She took a breather just for a minute and rested her head in her hands. But that also worried her: there was a hard ridge under her chin. She didn’t know what it was or why it had suddenly appeared in the past few weeks, but it felt most peculiar.

Still, at least it was Friday. Ella wondered what the girls would be up to this weekend—maybe Peg’s boyfriend Chuck would have people over at the Shack, or there’d be a plan to catch a movie at the Roxy. Her finger absentmindedly stroked the small pimple that had appeared on her usually perfect skin a day or two earlier; it was on her left cheek, right by her dimple. When it had appeared she’d picked at it and it had started to swell; she could feel the pain and pressure under her fingertips. Hopefully, her skin would clear up before any parties started.

She tried to concentrate on her work all morning, but found it harder and harder. No parties for her this weekend, that was for sure. In fact, she thought suddenly, no work either. She was done in—and she was done for today. She took her tray of dials up to Mr. Reed and said she had to go home sick. It was less than ten minutes before she was back on Clinton Street as the St. Columba bells tolled the hour of noon. She told her mom she wasn’t feeling well and probably went to bed.

“The next day,” remembered her mother, Nellie, “we went to the doctor.”4 That little pimple had swelled up on her daughter’s face and she wanted to get it checked. But there was nothing serious about her condition, and the doctor was in convivial spirits as he chatted with the Cruses. Ella told him how her mom was always scared of her working at Radium Dial, and he retorted with a hearty chuckle, “That’s all bunk, there’s not a cleaner place.”5

And so Ella and Nellie went back to Clinton Street.

Ella may have skipped church on the Sunday; she certainly wasn’t well enough for work come Monday morning. On Tuesday, August 30, her mother called out a physician again; he opened the pimple but nothing came out. He then left them to it; it appeared that whatever was causing Ella’s sickness was a mystery.

A mystery it may have been, but not right was what Ella Cruse knew it to be. That pimple, that little pimple, just kept swelling and swelling. It was incredibly painful. Nothing she or her mom or even the doctor did could halt it; it was an infection that was unstoppable. Her face became badly swollen; she had a fever too.

“The next day,” recalled Nellie, “[the doctor] looked at her face [again] and ordered her to the hospital.”6

Ella was admitted to Ottawa City Hospital on August 31. But still that spot got bigger and bigger—until you couldn’t call it a pimple anymore. It wasn’t even a boil; it went way beyond that. Ella’s neat haircut still sprouted from her head, as fashionable as ever, but the girl below, in just a few short days, became unrecognizable. Septic poisoning set in and her pretty face and head turned black.

“She suffered the awfulest pain…” remembered her mother in horror. “The awfulest pain I ever saw anyone suffer.”7

Ella was her only daughter. Nellie kept a bedside vigil as long as the doctors would let her, even though the person in the bed didn’t look like Ella anymore. But she was still Ella: she was still her daughter, and she was alive and she needed her mom.

Midnight, September 3. Saturday night slipped into Sunday morning, and Ella’s condition declined. As she lay in bed, her system septic, her head swollen and black, her face unrecognizable, the poison in her body did its worst. At 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, September 4, her death came suddenly. She had been at work painting dials just the week before; all she’d had was a little spot on her face. How had it come to this?

The doctors filled in her death certificate. “Streptococcic poisoning,” they wrote as the cause of death. “Contributory cause: infected face.”8

On September 6, Nellie and James Cruse traced the familiar path to St. Columba to bury their daughter. “Miss Cruse’s death,” reported the local paper, “came as a shock to all of her friends and family.”9

It was a shock. It left a hole; a hole in a family that could never be filled. Her parents said, many years later, “Life has never been the same since she went.”10

Ella’s obituary mentioned only one other detail as it mourned this youthful Ottawa girl, who had lived there most of her life, who’d had friends, been popular, worn her hair in a bob and lived her too-few days in the shadow of the church spire.

“She had been employed,” the paper noted, “at the Radium Dial…”11