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OTTAWA, ILLINOIS

—1929—

On February 26, 1929, radium-poisoning investigator Swen Kjaer made his way to the LaSalle County courthouse in the little town of Ottawa. He was surprised by how quiet it was; today, there was a hearing in the Ella Cruse case, and given the cacophony caused by the radium lawsuits out east, he had expected more fuss. Yet nobody was around; not an eyelash flickered in the sleepy town.

Inside the courthouse, during the hearing, it was equally undramatic. Here there were no throngs of journalists, no star witnesses, no dueling attorneys. All that happened was that the Cruse family’s lawyer, George Weeks, simply stood to request a postponement. With momentum provided by the New Jersey lawsuits, Kjaer was surprised he wasn’t pushing it through more quickly.

Afterward, when Kjaer questioned Weeks, he discovered why he wasn’t. The lawyer had needed to ask for postponements several times because he knew nothing about radium poisoning—and could not find any physician in Ottawa who could give him information. The family was claiming $3,750 ($51,977), which wasn’t avaricious, but at this rate they would not see a cent. Weeks couldn’t find anyone to tell him what radium poisoning was, let alone if Ella had died from it. Her parents were informed that the only way to get proof would be to exhume her body for an autopsy, but it would cost $200 ($2,772), money they simply didn’t have. The case was left high and dry.

Kjaer continued on his pilgrimage around town. He called on the doctors and dentists who had promised to alert him should any dial-painters present symptoms of radium poisoning. As before, they all reported no cases.

He also visited the Radium Dial studio. It was still bustling, filled with women painting dials. He met the manager and requested that the company-test data be shared with him. Radium Dial was now conducting regular medical exams of its employees—though the girls had noticed, as before, that they were separated prior to being tested. Catherine Wolfe even remembered, “Only once [was I] called to report for a physical examination [in 1928], whereas other girls apparently in good health were examined regularly.”1

Catherine was not in especially good health; she still had a limp, and just recently she had started suffering from fainting spells. Concerned, she’d asked Mr. Reed if she could see the company doctor again, but he’d refused. She told herself she was worrying over nothing. The company had assured her that expert tests showed she was healthy and vowed to close the studio if there was any hazard; yet it was busier by the day. As time passed after the furor in New Jersey, orders swiftly rose again to 1.1 million watches a year. Business was back on track.

However, Kjaer’s inspection of Radium Dial troubled him. Two lab workers from Chicago showed changes in their blood, demonstrating that the firm’s safety precautions were insufficient. The girls were also still eating in the studio without washing their hands. Kjaer concluded: “Further steps should be taken to protect the workers.”2

He met Joseph Kelly; the president promised him that the firm’s “intention” was “to assist you in every way possible.”3 Having now perused the test results, Kjaer wanted to discuss two employees in particular; one was Ella Cruse. Kjaer declared, “I feel that this case should not be left out [of my study].”4 He requested further information on both girls.

Yet when Kelly sent him the data, all he enclosed were employment dates—hardly enlightening. Kjaer’s time was limited, so he didn’t grill the company further; he thought he had enough to go on anyway.

And so, in his report, which was never seen by the Radium Dial girls, he wrote:

One dial-painter, ML, a twenty-four-year-old female, employed in a studio in Illinois, had been found radioactive in 1925 by electroscopic test. In 1928, another test was made, and she was found still radioactive… Complete information was not obtainable, and the firm protests against calling the diseased condition radium poisoning, but it seems well indicated by the test.5

ML. Margaret Looney. She had been told by the firm she had “a high standard of health.”6 She had been told that her tests showed nothing to worry about.

She had no idea of what was coming.

Peg Looney smiled up at Chuck Hackensmith from the red metal wagon she was sitting in. Somewhat self-consciously, she thanked him for his help.

In response, Chuck threw a golden grin over his well-muscled shoulder and picked up the handle of the wagon. “Here we go…” he likely cried with typical verve to his fiancée. And then the cold marble athlete leaped to life…

“At the end, when Peg was too sick to walk, Chuck would put her in a wagon and take her around the neighborhood,”7 remembered Peg’s niece Darlene. Peg’s sister Jean agreed: “He would just put her in the little red wagon and take her all over.”8

But no matter how broad Chuck’s grin was as he pulled that wagon, no matter how determined he became to put a brave face on what was happening, he couldn’t conceal his true feelings. “He was devastated with the whole thing,”9 recalled Darlene sadly.

The entire family felt the same. For by the summer of 1929, red-haired Peg Looney was not at all well. The teeth extractions that never healed had only been the start of it; she’d developed anemia and then this pain had settled in her hip so that now she could barely walk—thus the little red wagon that Chuck had commandeered to take her up to the Shack or along to Starved Rock. He was awful kind, but then he loved her fiercely. They were going to be married next June.

Chuck and his red wagon couldn’t be there all the time, though. When Peg went to the radium studio, she had to walk. Her sister Jean remembered the way that she and all the Looney siblings would look out for her coming home.

“We’d all be sitting out on our porch just watching for her because she looked so bad walking,” said Jean. “[She’d be struggling] all the way home. We’d run to meet her, each one would have an arm to help her.”10

When she reached home, borne along by her siblings, Peg could no longer assist her mother with the housework as she once had. She would simply have to lie down and rest. Her mother felt terrible watching her daughter’s decline; Peg was wasting away, and her family watched in horror as she pulled teeth and parts of her jaw from her mouth. In the end, her parents scraped together the money to take her to a doctor in Chicago. The city physician told her she had a honeycombed jaw and that she should change employment.

Perhaps Peg planned to look for a new job, when she felt better. Yet Peg was smart; she knew she wasn’t getting better. Though the Ottawa doctors seemed clueless—one, who treated her in June 1929, simply put an ice pack on her chest—Peg herself seemed to divine what was happening. “She knew she had to go,” recalled Peg’s mother sadly. “You could see her slowly dying. There was nothing you could do.”11

“Well, Mother,” she used to say. “My time is nearly up.”12

It wasn’t just her hip or teeth that caused her agonizing pain: it was her legs, her skull, her ribs, her wrists, her ankles… Though she’d been ill for months, every day she still went to work to paint those dials. To the end, she was a conscientious girl.

Radium Dial—warned by Kjaer that Peg’s was a special case in which the government was particularly interested—watched her very closely. They knew she had tested positive for radioactivity in 1925 and 1928; they knew from their own medical tests exactly what was wrong with her. And so, when Peg collapsed at work on August 6, 1929, Mr. Reed made arrangements for her to be admitted to the company doctor’s hospital.

“The family really didn’t have any say in any of that,” said her niece Darlene. “We were pretty much shut out. It was always odd to me. What kind of factory has its own doctor? It did not make sense at all.

“Radium Dial probably paid the bills,” she added. “We didn’t have money for big medical bills; that was for sure.”13

It was so lonely for Peg in that distant hospital, far from her home by the railroad tracks. The girl who had nine brothers and sisters and slept with them all in the one tiny room, three to a bed, was completely on her own. Her siblings weren’t permitted to visit. Her sister Jane went one time, but the doctors wouldn’t let her into Peg’s room.

Peg had displayed symptoms of diphtheria and was promptly quarantined. In her weakened condition, she also soon contracted pneumonia. Radium Dial, in a show of concern, paid close attention to her progress; to her decline.

At 2:10 a.m. on August 14, 1929, Margaret Looney died. This girl, who was to marry Chuck next year, who loved to read the dictionary, who had once had dreams to be a teacher and was well known for her giggling fits, was no more.

Her family, though isolated from her, were still in the hospital when she died. Peg’s brother-in-law Jack White, who was married to her sister Catherine, an imposing man who worked as a car oiler for the railroad, was one of the relatives present. He was the type of man who stood up for the right thing to be done. Which was why, when the company men came in the middle of the night and tried to take her body to bury it, Jack protested vehemently.

“No,” he said firmly to them. “You will not [take her body]. She’s a good Catholic girl and she’ll have the whole Catholic funeral and have a mass.”14

“I think it was probably a good thing he was there,” commented Darlene shrewdly, “because I do not know that the rest of the family—with everything that was going on—I don’t know if they’d have been able to stand up to the company and the doctor. But Jack was more forceful. He told them, ‘That’s not going to happen.’”15

The company men tried to argue with him. “They wanted the whole thing done with—just gone,” Darlene went on. “It was like a big cover-up.”16 But Jack stood his ground would not allow them to take Peg’s body.

Radium Dial lost that particular battle—but did not give up. It seems the firm was concerned that Peg’s death would be attributed to radium poisoning, which would scare all the girls at the studio and possibly lead to innumerable lawsuits. The executives needed to take control of the situation. What did the family think, they asked, of having Peg autopsied?

The Looney family were already suspicious, given the Chicago doctor’s comments, that it was her work that had killed Peg. They readily agreed, on condition that their own family doctor could be present, because they wanted to find out the truth. Their proviso was all-important: after the firm’s midnight machinations, they did not trust them.

The company agreed easily. Yes, yes, they said, no problem. What time?

When the family doctor arrived at the appointed hour, bag in hand, he found the autopsy had been performed an hour before he got there.

He wasn’t there to see the multiple fracture lines on Peg’s ribs, nor the way “the flat bones of [her] skull showed numerous ‘thin’ areas and ‘holes.’”17 He didn’t examine the radium necrosis that was found “very strongly”18 in the skull vault, pelvis, and at least sixteen other bones. He did not witness the widespread skeletal changes that were evident throughout Peg’s battered body.

He was not there to see as the company doctor “removed by post-mortem resection”19 the remains of Peg Looney’s jaw.

He took her bones. He took the most compelling evidence. The family was not sent a copy of the report, but Radium Dial received one. It was an incredibly intrusive record for them to have of Peg’s last moments. It told them what she was like inside: the weight of her organs, their appearance; whether she was “normal” or not. When it came to her bone marrow and her teeth, according to the company doctor, she most certainly was.

“The teeth are in excellent condition,” read the official autopsy report. “There is no evidence of any destructive bone changes in the upper or lower jaw.”20

Her death certificate was duly signed: diphtheria was the cause of death.

The family may not have been given a copy of the report, but Radium Dial made sure to issue the local paper with a summary of it. And so, in Peg Looney’s obituary, the following information was included at the request of the firm:

The young woman’s physical condition for a time was puzzling. She was employed at the Radium Dial studio and there were rumors that her condition was due to radium poisoning. In order that there might be no doubt as to the cause of death [there was] an autopsy…Dr. Aaron Arkin…said there was no doubt that death was caused by diphtheria. There was no visible indication of radium poisoning.21

There was a curious final comment, perhaps inserted on a press release by a company executive with a bright idea of how to win support in the community. “Miss Looney’s parents,” read the piece, “appeared well pleased with the result of the autopsy.”22

They were not “well pleased.” They were devastated by their daughter’s death.

“It just killed my mother to lose her,” said Jean. “She was never the same after she died. My mother was just terrible. We used to walk up to the cemetery all the time, early in the morning, pushing an old push-mower to keep the grass cut up with it; it was a few miles. We’d walk up there all the time.”23

As for Chuck, losing his beloved Peg was something he would never get over. He moved on with his life, eventually, and followed the dreams that once they both had shared. He became a professor at a university and published several books; Peg, no doubt, would have loved to have read them. He married, and had children. And he kept in touch with the Looney family for more than forty years. His wife confided in Peg’s mother how every year, when it was near the anniversary of Peg’s birthday or death, he would become quiet and withdrawn.

“She knew,” Darlene said simply, “he was thinking about Peg.”24