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ORANGE, NEW JERSEY

—Summer 1928—

For those five New Jersey dial-painters who had triumphed over their former firm, life was sweet. From her award, Katherine gave her father, William, $2,000 ($27,700) toward his mortgage: “I could find, I knew, no greater happiness than that which would be mine by making the folks happy,” she pronounced. “It made me so happy to see Father…relieved of those worries.”1

For herself, she would live “like Cinderella as the princess at the ball,” she declared. “Today was mine.”2 The budding author bought a typewriter, as well as splashing out on clothes: silk dresses and lingerie. “I bought the kind of coat I had always wanted,” she enthused, “and a tan felt hat to match.”3

Edna, who had always loved music, invested in a piano and a radio. Many of the women bought automobiles so they could get around more easily. Yet the girls were also financially astute, investing in building and loan shares.

“Not a cent of [the money] has ever entered this house,” Grace informed a reporter. “To me, money doesn’t mean luxury. It means security. Those $10,000 are safely invested.”4

“What for?”5 asked the journalist.

Grace smiled enigmatically as she answered. “For the future!”6

And the money wasn’t the only boon to their spirits, for many of the doctors they consulted now offered hope. Von Sochocky announced that, “In my opinion, the girls are going to live much longer than they themselves believe.”7 Even Martland, noting that there had been no deaths for some years of the ilk suffered by Mollie Maggia and Marguerite Carlough, theorized that there were now “two kinds of dial-painter cases, early ones and late ones. The early ones were marked by severe anemia and jaw necrosis… The late cases lacked (or had recovered from) the anemia and jaw infections.”8 Martland thought the faster decay of mesothorium accounted for the difference; the girls were under attack ferociously for the first seven years, but once mesothorium moved to its next half-life, the attack diminished sufficiently to spare the girls; almost as though their poisoning was a rising tidal wave, and the women had managed to scramble to safety just as the waters began to recede. Although the radium was still bombarding their bones, radium was notoriously less aggressive than mesothorium. Martland now posited that if the late cases “survived the early maladies, they had a fair chance of surviving radium poisoning altogether”9—although they would always have those moth-eaten bones from the radium rippled right through them. “I am of the opinion that the girls we are seeing now,” he said, “while they may be permanently crippled, have a considerable chance of beating the disease.”10

That prognosis, bleak as it sounded in some ways, gave the women that most precious of commodities: time. “Someone may find a cure for us, even at the eleventh hour,”11 Grace said brightly.

Most of the girls went away for the summer. Albina and James set off on “the dream of a lifetime”12: a motoring trip to Canada. Louis Hussman took his wife on “a long, leisurely tour”13; Edna wrote to Berry, “We have a cottage overlooking the lake and enjoy the beautiful scenery.”14 While Quinta and James McDonald took a few trips to Asbury Park, they didn’t go overboard; Quinta was aware that this money was to ensure that her children would be all right, no matter what happened to her.

However they spent the summer, the girls could rest easy that help was coming to other women similarly afflicted; in the light of the tremendous publicity caused by their case, a national conference into radium poisoning would be held at the end of the year. In addition, Swen Kjaer was now undertaking a much more detailed federal study into radium poisoning. “There is no question that this is an occupational disease and that there should be a reinvestigation,”15 commented Kjaer’s boss Ethelbert Stewart. He was asked why some firms were still using the old brush application method when others had been invented and replied shrewdly: “The new methods probably were too slow for the greatest profit to the manufacturers.”16

Katherine Schaub, who spent the entire summer away from Newark, experiencing “real country life,”17 was feeling so much better and declared her summer “splendid”18; “a vacation like I have never had.”19 “I loved to sit on the porch in the sun,” she wrote dreamily, “and look out over the wide stretches of woodlands and hills.”20

While sitting on that porch, she wrote to Berry to thank him for all he had done. “I myself know,” she wrote, “that from a humanitarian viewpoint it would be difficult to find another like yourself…there was nothing too much for you…and to think that the result now was such a tremendous success overwhelms me indeed.”21 She also wrote to Martland, as did the other girls, saying simply: “I am writing to express my sincerest appreciation for your great assistance in bringing it all to a happy ending.”22

A happy ending…if only that could be. Behind the scenes, Berry was most concerned that Katherine’s “happy ending” was as fictional as a fairy tale. “I think that the matter is not, by any means, over,” he wrote to an associate, “and that the actual contest has only been deferred.”23

Following the settlement, USRC had immediately launched into damage-limitation mode regarding what it dubbed “so-called radium poisoning”24; it still denied any hazard existed and seemed confident that the medical board appointed to examine the girls would soon give all five a clean bill of health. The firm wasted no time in appointing two doctors who might well give that clearance: one was James Ewing, the radium-medicine specialist who had already spoken out against Martland—one of Berry’s doctor friends warned, “[He] must be watched”25—and the other, mutually agreed appointment was Lloyd Craver. Both were consultants at a hospital “closely allied with the use of radium,”26 but Berry found it “impossible”27 to keep them out. The girls’ appointed physician would be Edward Krumbhaar. Martland wrote: “The damage is done now and Berry must make the best of it.”28

In the fall of 1928, the girls were summoned to a New York hospital for the first committee examination. Since two of the physicians denied the existence of radium poisoning, it is to be wondered what they thought of the suffering women who now came before them. Katherine was “obviously very lame and bent over”29; Grace had “distinct limitation of motion in her left elbow”30 and what remained of her jawbone was “exposed”31 in her mouth. Quinta was in plaster casts; Edna’s legs irrevocably crossed. Yet as the women stripped and underwent invasive medical exams, conducted by these doctors who were strangers to them, it was perhaps Albina’s condition that shocked the physicians most. Krumbhaar later said, “Mrs. Larice had marked limitation of motion of both hip joints, so that it was almost impossible for Dr. Craver to make a vaginal examination.”32

The doctors conducted a breath test, two of them convinced it would clear the company. Yet the results, as Ewing wrote afterwards, “proved positive, rather to our surprise.”33 Rather than take this as evidence the girls were telling the truth, he continued, “The question now arises whether there might be some kind of fraud by the patient… To make the tests absolutely trustworthy, we think it will be necessary to carry them out at some hotel where the patients can undress.”34 The girls would have to go through it all again.

In November, the five women attended the Hotel Marseilles for further examination. This time, only Craver from the committee was present; but it was not he who was in command. Instead, Dr. Schlundt—the “intimate friend”35 of Vice President Barker who had already declared the women to be nonradioactive in the company’s breath tests in April—took charge. Barker himself was also present and “assisted”36; there was a further doctor, Dr. G. Failla, in attendance too.

The girls perceived at once that this was not an impartial exam, but what recourse did they have to stop it? It was part of their settlement that they would agree to medical procedures. And so they were forced to strip as directed and went through the tests with the company men watching all they did closely.

The moment they were free from the hotel, however, Grace Fryer telephoned Berry. She was—as in many ways she always had been—the linchpin of the group, and their leader. Now, she brought their collective protests to Berry.

Their lawyer was outraged. He wrote at once to USRC to say he viewed the hotel setting with “great suspicion”37 and believed the presence of Barker and Schlundt “constitutes a breach of the settlement agreement,”38 for the committee tests were supposed to be nonpartisan. As it turned out, however, Dr. Failla declared emphatically: “All five patients are radioactive.”39

It was a genuine blow to the company, for every day they seemed to receive another lawsuit; they’d wanted to have these famous dial-painters deemed free of radium as a further defense. Berry himself was representing one of the new cases, acting for Mae Cubberley Canfield, the dial-painter who’d instructed Katherine Schaub. Like the others, Mae’s teeth were gone and her gums infected; her jaw also “felt funny…like a knock in it”40 and she was paralyzed intermittently on her right side.

Berry won a battle partway through the new war when the judge in Mae’s case ruled that Dr. Flinn could not conduct examinations of her for the company; only a physician could do it. It was a small victory, for nothing had come of Berry’s complaints to the authorities about Flinn. The lack of action left him free to publish: Flinn next blamed the girls’ “improper diet”41 for their “tendency to store radium in their bones.”42

No one knew what von Sochocky’s diet was, but improper or not, that November he lost his battle against the radium inside him. Martland paid tribute to the doctor: “Without his valuable aid and suggestions,” he said, “we would have been greatly handicapped in our investigation.”43 That was true, for without von Sochocky’s help with the creation of the tests, radium poisoning might never have been medically proven. Of course, without von Sochocky’s invention of luminous paint in the first place, the girls would have been leading very different lives…

For the girls, they could not forget what they saw as the doctor’s betrayal in the courtroom. Perhaps, then, there was a kind of schadenfreude in his demise. One newspaper described radium paint as a “veritable Frankenstein in a test tube, which has turned on its creator”44; Martland added, “He died a horrible death.”45

It meant he wasn’t present at the national radium conference, held in December 1928. All the key players were there: Hamilton, Wiley, Martland, Humphries, Roach, Ethelbert Stewart, Flinn, Schlundt, and the radium-company executives.

No one invited the dial-painters.

It was a voluntary conference, organized by the trade, in an attempt to claw back some control. The surgeon general, who was chairing it, acknowledged that “anything we draw up here is simply in the form of suggestions, but not any authority in the way of police regulations.”46 It was, as Wiley’s boss later put it, “a whitewash.”47

The issues were debated. Stewart made a passionate speech to the radium industry: “The luminous watch is purely a fad. Do you want to go ahead with the use of a thing which is so useless; which has, in spite of everything you can do, an element of serious danger in it? I certainly hope that you are going to agree that it is not worth what it costs.”48

But the companies did not agree; one firm said 85 percent of its business came from luminous dials—it was far too lucrative an industry to abandon. The executives argued that only New Jersey cases had come to light, so it wasn’t a nationwide problem; with Flinn having silenced the Waterbury girls, Stewart could riposte with only one formally documented case outside USRC, which was evidenced by the Ella Cruse lawsuit in Illinois—yet hers was only a suspected case and not proven. The lack of evidence of an endemic problem meant the girls’ supporters were powerless to push through any proposals, even though Wiley’s boss called it “cold-blooded murder in industry.”49

The conference didn’t confirm that radium poisoning existed or even that radium was dangerous, it simply agreed that further study should continue via two committees—yet there is no record the committees ever met. As the New Jersey girls’ stories became yesterday’s news, no one was championing the dial-painters’ cause anymore. “The Radium Corp.,” Berry wrote in frustration, “is playing a game.”50 And, it seemed, the radium companies were winning.

There were two other delegates worthy of mention at the national radium conference: Joseph Kelly and Rufus Fordyce, of Radium Dial—the executives who had recently signed their names beneath the company statement in the Ottawa press. They appear only to have listened, and not contributed to the debate. They listened as one specialist said, “My advice to anyone manufacturing watches today would be to cut out the brush because you can paint on in another way.”51 They listened as the New Jersey girls’ deaths and disabilities were debated. They listened, as the industry got away with murder.

And then they went home.