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The girls were devastated. Even Grace Fryer, who for so long had stayed incredibly strong, couldn’t bear it. She flung her body “down on the couch in her living room [and] gave herself up to the pent-up tears.”1

Her mother tried to calm her, gently touching her daughter’s metal-bound back, trying not to bruise her thin skin. “Grace,” she said, “this is the first time you have failed to smile.”2

But the girls could not believe what had happened. Markley had said “it would hardly be worthwhile for him to begin his case with only half the day remaining,”3 and thus the case had been postponed until there was sufficient time in the court calendar—the company intended to present approximately thirty expert witnesses. The serial story in the Orange Daily Courier that week was “Girl Alone”4; well, all five dial-painters truly felt that way.

But they were not alone: they had Raymond Berry. Immediately he fought the decision and, crucially, found two lawyers, Frank Bradner and Hervey Moore, who had a case scheduled for the end of May and were willing to give up their court slot so that the girls’ case could be heard instead. Backes agreed at once to the new timing and Berry let the women know the good news.

The United States Radium Corporation, however, was not pleased at Berry’s intervention and said it would be “impossible”5 for them to proceed in May; their experts were “going abroad for several months and will not be back until after the summer.”6

Berry was outraged. “I am sure you must agree,” he wrote to Markley, “that there is a rather harsh irony in the situation which permits the victims of poisoning to languish and die because certain trained men must disport themselves in Europe.”7

Despite the company’s intransigence, in Berry’s own words, he was “far from finished in this fight.”8 Aware that USRC’s procrastination was arguably cynical—perhaps it wanted the girls to die before a verdict could be given—Berry now drew on the feeble health of his clients to fight their cause, asking four different doctors to sign to sworn statements: “These girls are all becoming progressively worse. It is very possible that all or some of these five girls may be dead by September 1928.”9

It made for horrendous reading for the women. Humphries reported they were “kept under a constant mental strain.”10 Yet it was the kind of move that Berry instinctively knew would get results—and he was right. For faced with this kind of injustice, the media were up in arms. Berry’s ally Walter Lippmann rose to the occasion magnificently, writing in the World: “We confidently assert that this is one of the most damnable travesties of justice that has ever come to our attention.”11

His influential editorial provoked immediate support from across the nation. One man wrote to the News, “Open the courts, quash the postponements, give these five women a fighting chance!”12 Norman Thomas, meanwhile, a socialist politician who was often called “the conscience of America,”13 declared that the case was a “vivid example of the ways of an unutterably selfish capitalist system which cares nothing about the lives of its workers, but seeks only to guard its profits.”14

“Everywhere, people were asking why justice was being denied these five women, who…had but a year to live,” said Katherine Schaub, almost in disbelief. “What had once been a hopeless case, unheeded and unnoticed, now flashed before the public.”15

And the public was transfixed. “Letters came pouring in from all corners of the earth,”16 Katherine remembered.

Though most were positive, some swung the other way. “Radium could not produce the effects ascribed to it,” one radium-company executive wrote bitterly to Quinta. “It is pathetic that your lawyers and doctors should be so ignorant.”17 Some quacks were aggressive in their overtures. “For $1,000 [almost $14,000] I can cure each of you,” a woman proposing a treatment of “scientific baths” declared.18 “If not, I will ask nothing except the $200 [$2,775] I want in advance. This means life or death… You had better work fast, for when that poison reaches your heart—good-bye girlie.”19

Many letters contained suggestions for cures. These ranged from boiled milk and gunpowder to magic words and rhubarb juice. An electric blanket was another suggestion, with its manufacturer envisioning a unique marketing opportunity. “It is not to make money we wish to cure them,” protested the firm. “The advertising it would give our method would be amply paid.”20

The girls were famous. Undeniably, truly famous. Berry, himself adept at envisioning opportunities, immediately capitalized on it. He broached the subject of courting the press with the girls, and they were all for it. And so, as the month of May 1928 dragged on and every day seemed to bring forth another call for justice from the press, Berry ensured that the girls were center stage. Close friends Quinta and Grace gave a joint photo shoot and interview; Grace wore a pretty cherry-patterned blouse—with her now-constant bandage on her chin—while Quinta donned a pale dress with a pussy-bow neckline. And the girls, every one of them, talked. They shared the details of their lives: how Quinta had to be carried to her hospital appointments; how Albina had lost all her children; how Edna’s legs were crossed beyond repair. They let their personalities shine through their suffering—and the public adored them.

“Don’t write all this stuff in the papers about our bearing up wonderfully,” Quinta said with a cheeky smile. “I am neither a martyr or a saint.”21 Grace remarked she was “still living and hoping.”22 “I am facing fate,” she declared, “with the spirit of a Spartan.”23

They weren’t always easy interviews. When journalists asked Quinta about Mollie’s death, she had to stop for a moment to compose herself. Katherine Schaub said in one interview: “Don’t think I’m crying because I’m downhearted—it’s because my hip hurts so. Sometimes it seems as though a knife was boring into my side.”24

Yet the tragedy and pain were part of the appeal for the captivated public. Radium poisoning—with its child-killing devastation and disfiguring symptoms—“seemed to destroy their very womanhood.”25 The public, shocked and saddened, took the girls to their hearts.

Berry soon realized how much the coverage was helping—because Edward Markley was spitting feathers. “Personally, I do not like your attitude,” wrote the USRC lawyer huffily to Berry, “especially the newspaper notoriety which you are giving these cases. The ethical aspect of trying your case in a newspaper is questionable, to say the least. I am quite confident that eventually you will be properly rewarded, either in this world or the next.”26

Berry replied only briefly. “I am surprised,” he wrote innocently, “that you should raise the question of ethics…”27

Whatever Markley thought of the media, however, the firm he represented knew it had to present its side of the story. Predictably, USRC wheeled out Dr. Flinn, who pronounced that his tests showed “there is no radium”28 in the women; he was convinced, he said, that their health problems were caused by nerves. This was a common response to women’s occupational illnesses, which were often first attributed to female hysteria. The World, for one, was utterly unconvinced by Flinn. Lippmann wrote that his statement had “all the appearance of being timed to support the argument of the [USRC] lawyers.”29 He continued: “It is not part of this newspaper’s practice to attempt to put pressure upon the courts. But this is unmanly, unjust and cruel.”30

Markley was powerless to stop the rising wave of support for the women. When asked for a comment, all he could say was that he felt the girls were being “exploited by a young Newark lawyer.”31 Yet the women themselves certainly didn’t feel that way. They were leading the charge to bring their employers to justice. At last, the world was listening to them—and they were not shutting up.

“When I die,” Katherine Schaub told the press with heartrending pathos, “I’ll only have lilies on my coffin, not roses as I’d like. If I won my $250,000, mightn’t I have lots of roses?”32

“So many of the girls I know won’t own up,” she went on, “they say they are alright. They’re afraid of losing their boyfriends and the good times. They know it isn’t rheumatism they’ve got—God, what fools, pathetic fools! They’re afraid of being ostracized.”33

Grace Fryer was also telling truths. “I couldn’t say I’m happy,” she admitted, “but at least I’m not utterly discouraged. I intend to make the most out of what life is left me.”34 And, when the time came, she said she wanted to donate her body to science, so that doctors might be able to find a cure; the other girls would later follow suit. “My body means nothing but pain to me,” Grace revealed, “and it might mean longer life or relief to the others, if science had it. It’s all I have to give.”35 She gave a determined smile. “Can’t you understand why I’m offering it?”36

The journalists almost swooned. “It is not a question of giving up hope,” one reporter commented after Grace’s promise. “Grace has hope—not that selfish hope that perhaps you or I might have, but the hope for contributing betterment to humanity.”37

With such a public platform—and public sympathy—the momentum in the case was definitely in the women’s favor; and it was at this point that Judge Backes came up with an inspired interpretation of the statute for Berry. He suggested that because the girls’ bones contained radium and the radium was still hurting them, they were still being injured; “therefore, the statute began tolling anew each moment of that injury.”38 It was brilliant.

Whether it was an argument that would stand up in court was, of course, still to be tested—but Berry found that, in the light of public pressure, the justice system was now willing to support him. No matter the response of the radium company, the trial was scheduled to go ahead. Toward the end of May 1928, Judge Mountain wrote to Berry: “I will set [the] cases down for trial on Thursday next. Counsel will accordingly prepare to proceed on that morning without fail.”39

Nothing was going to stand in the way of justice—of that both Berry and the girls were sure. Carried along on a swell of public favor, it seemed they would soon be home and dry.

Berry was in his office, preparing for the case, when his telephone chimed. His secretary Rose quickly transferred the call.

Judge Clark was on the line.