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ORANGE, NEW JERSEY

—1929—

Katherine Schaub rebuttoned her blouse after her medical examination and waited for Dr. Craver to speak; he’d said he had something important he wished to discuss. To her astonishment, he proposed that the radium company should stop paying her medical bills; in the settlement they had agreed to cover them for life. He wanted her, instead, to accept a one-off lump sum.

Less than a year after the New Jersey settlement had been reached, the United States Radium Corporation was attempting to renege on its agreement.

The idea of paying a lump sum originated with Vice President Barker, but it had the full support of the company doctors. Dr. Ewing deemed the current arrangements “unsatisfactory,”1 as “these women are not going to die.”2 In his lab, Craver now used to Katherine “the potent argument about the bankruptcy of the company”3 to induce her to accept—but USRC was not bankrupt; anything but. Such an untruth, Berry later said when Katherine told him anxiously of the doctor’s scheme, was “purely a ‘painted devil’ to compel a settlement.”4

Finding the women still alive one year on seems to have been a financial irritation to the firm, for the women, crippled and in pain, were regularly consulting doctors and buying palliative medicines. From USRC’s perspective, it was too much; they quibbled every bill. The girls, Ewing warned threateningly, should be “cautious about assuming that every expense they incur will be paid.”5

The board of doctors had been expected to announce that the women were not suffering from radium poisoning, thus freeing the company from its responsibilities. It seemed that Ewing, whom Berry described as having a “hostile attitude,”6 certainly longed for that diagnosis. But to Ewing’s frustration, even though the board kept subjecting the women to test after test, they found each one duplicated the previous results.

Berry wanted the board to issue a formal statement that the girls had radium poisoning: it would be firm evidence that dial-painters as a group were afflicted by it, which Berry and others could then use in the upcoming lawsuits for the girls’ friends. But Ewing refused. “We are quite unwilling to have these findings used in connection with any other case,”7 he wrote primly.

As for the girls themselves, they were just doing their best to get through it all. They were subjected to a harrowing array of experimental treatments and tests. The physicians tried Epsom salts that made them sick, colonic irrigations, and weeklong assessments on their spines and excreta. The exams were usually conducted at Ewing and Craver’s hospital, which meant the crippled women had to travel to New York. Louis Hussman told Berry that “it is very difficult for Edna to go so far without injury to her; the last time she went to New York she had to go to her bed as a result.”8

Edna’s beautiful blond hair, by now, had become snow white. All the girls looked far older than they were, with faces that had curiously slack skin around their chins, where their jawbones had been removed. Only Grace seemed better than she had the year before. Although she had now had twenty-five operations on her jaw, they had failed to break her habit of smiling; she was said to be the happiest of the five by far. When she’d received the settlement, she’d said with determination, “People are now asking me if I am going to stop working: I do not intend to do anything of the kind. I’m going to keep right on at my job as long as I can, because I like it.”9 She still commuted daily, with the bank being understanding about the time off she needed for her tests.

Though the tests happened often, the girls never learned the results. “The doctors don’t seem to tell [me] anything,” complained Katherine. “I would like to know if I am getting any better.”10 In fact, in many ways, Katherine was better, for she now lived quietly in a rural convalescent home set on a hilltop, twelve miles out of Newark, which she called “the jewel of the east.”11 She wrote that the setting inspired her to get well so she could enjoy “hollyhocks and rambler roses and peonies and sunshine.”12 The money had helped Albina too; she was described as being “the picture of contentment”13 that summer. Her pleasures were now her radio, goldfish, the movies, and short jaunts in the country, often with Quinta.

At the present time, however, Quinta had been admitted to hospital; she was unable to sit up, and only family visitors were allowed. It not only meant that she wasn’t available for jaunts to the country; she was also unable to attend court on behalf of Mae Canfield, as the other four women did in the summer of 1929. Quinta did, however, ask Berry to represent her.

It was a preliminary hearing. As he worked on Mae’s case, Berry was fast coming to appreciate the sheer canniness of the radium firm in settling the year before. The second time around, it was even harder for him to build a case; the Drinkers, Kjaer, and Martland all refused to testify, and there were no champions in the press hounding the firm into submission.

The five girls were helping Mae by waiving their right to patient confidentiality; they wanted the committee of doctors to use their cases to prove that radium poisoning existed. But not only did Markley object to any reference to the five girls—both their medical diagnoses and even the fact of last year’s settlement—by saying that they were “in no way connected to this case,”14 the company-appointed doctors also declined to give evidence.

Yet as Katherine had once written, it would be difficult to find another like Raymond Berry. He summoned Craver and Ewing to the hearing regardless; they were “furious.”15 Even though Ewing witnessed the women swearing under oath that they were happy for him to discuss their cases, he refused on the grounds of patient confidentiality.

Dr. Krumbhaar, the girls’ ally on the board, was happy to give evidence. And even though Markley threatened to sue him if he did, Berry persuaded the doctor to continue. The lawyer’s skill both in handling witnesses and in presenting his case was growing; he now had all the data and experience to make life very difficult indeed for the United States Radium Corporation: he was a most uncomfortable thorn in its side. The executives had assumed that when they settled the first five cases, Berry would be off their backs. They now realized they had been very much mistaken.

Black Tuesday, they called it—October 29, 1929, the day a financial nightmare rocked Wall Street and “paper fortunes…melted away like frost under a hot sun.”16

“Wall Street,” wrote one witness to the crash that day, “was a street of vanished hopes, of curiously silent apprehension and of a sort of paralyzed hypnosis.”17

More than a hundred blocks north of where America’s economy was imploding, Quinta McDonald lay in her room at the New York Memorial Hospital. Here, too, was silent apprehension and paralysis—but never, Quinta promised herself, never would her hope be gone.

She had been admitted in September “in a dying condition,”18 but a month on she was still fighting—and how. It was incredible for her friends and family to witness. “She was a Spartan,” said her sister-in-law Ethel, who was caring for the McDonald children while their mother was in hospital. “She always said ‘pretty good’ when I asked her how she was. Never did she think she was going to die.”19

“Her one thought was to live for the children,” commented Quinta’s husband, James. “The thought of them lent her courage to fight for her life.”20

The McDonalds were now reconciled, yet the past year had been turbulent. Although James had been awarded $400 ($5,544) in the 1928 settlement, that sum was dwarfed by his wife’s new wealth—and it seems the difference had rankled. Then unemployed, James had spent his money in speakeasies over the summer, while Quinta had invested hers in a trust fund for the children. One night in September 1928, his resentment had come to a head. When Quinta refused his demands for money, James had viciously struck his crippled wife and threatened to gas her to death, turning on every gas jet in the house as she lay helpless in her plaster casts. He was arrested. Quinta, however, did not press charges; it was not the first time she’d been hit. She did begin divorce proceedings, with Berry’s help, but it seems James later won her round and they were eventually dropped. “My husband tries to be brave,” she’d said of him once. “But it’s harder on men than women.”21

Now, in the fall of 1929, it was Quinta who had to be brave. “For the past three weeks,” Ethel said in early November, “she could not move. She had to be fed with a spoon.”22 But in a turnaround that amazed doctors, Quinta now began winning her desperate fight.

She might have been inspired in her recovery by Grace and Albina, who were both doing well. When Grace visited Quinta in hospital one evening, she granted the reporters waiting outside a brief interview, revealing proudly that she no longer always wore her back brace. “Doctors told me I had great resistance to disease and that’s why I got along so well,” she told them, and then added jokingly: “I had resistance enough to get up and vote for Hoover when I was supposed to be sick in bed!”23 Quinta, too, hoped to be up again before too long—or at least well enough to go home. She improved rapidly, so much so that James got the house ready for her return, and the family celebrated Thanksgiving and their daughter Helen’s tenth birthday with the cheering thought of her homecoming uppermost in their minds.

“Each time we [saw her] during the last several weeks,” Grace enthused, “she has been stronger. And today she was her old self again. It’s been a long time since she has been so well.”24 Quinta asked Grace to buy Christmas gifts for the children on her behalf; she was determined to make it a holiday season they would never forget.

By December 6, Quinta was almost perky. James visited her on that Friday evening and they chatted about Christmas; they hoped she would be home to enjoy the festivities with the family. Midway through their conversation, she suddenly sighed.

“I’m tired,”25 she was reported to remark.

James was not surprised. He bent to give her a kiss, careful not to touch her leg. She had a swelling of some size at the top of her thigh, and it gave her a lot of pain. They both glanced at the clock on the ward; it was not quite the closing hour for visitors.

“Would you mind leaving a little early?”26 she purportedly asked.

He did as she requested, departing with no sense of foreboding.

That swelling on Quinta’s leg… Had Martland seen it, he might have recognized it. For it was a sarcoma—the kind of bone tumor that had killed Ella Eckert on a cold December day almost two years ago.

Just before 2:00 p.m. on December 7, 1929, Quinta McDonald sank into a coma. The hospital telephoned James and he left home immediately, driving as fast as he could; he was stopped twice for breaking the speed limit, but the police let him go after they learned his mission. His efforts were all in vain. When James arrived at the Memorial Hospital, “tears streaming down his face,”27 he was a few minutes too late. Quinta McDonald was dead. He oscillated between rage and depression before settling on simple grief.

“I am heartbroken,” he later said. He added quietly, “I am glad she has found peace.”28

Her friends were devastated. They had become a tight-knit unit: the five of them against the company; against the world. Quinta was the first of them to fall. Albina collapsed when she heard the news; Katherine Schaub was greatly shaken too. Katherine chose not to attend the funeral, but returned to her country home “to find forgetfulness and to continue [her] studies.”29 She was taking an English correspondence course at Columbia University; she planned to write a book about her experiences. “For a time,” she said, “I succeeded in losing myself entirely in my lessons and in my writing.”30

For the girls remaining in Orange, there was no such forgetfulness. In a way, they wanted to remember: to remember Quinta. On Tuesday, December 10, Edna, Albina, and Grace arrived at St. Venantius Church for her funeral. The variance in their fortunes was clear for the waiting reporters to see: Grace “walked briskly and unaided,”31 while Edna “seemed to be the most affected by the disease.”32 For Albina, this was the second sister she had lost to radium poisoning, and even to attend was a struggle. Yet she was determined to pay her respects. There was a long flight of stairs leading to the church door, but Albina fought her way up every single step, even though she was “apparently near collapse.”33 This was more important than her comfort. This was for Quinta.

It was a brief service. Helen and Robert, the McDonald children, “kept close to their father, both too young to realize their loss, yet sensing.”34 In the weeks to come, they would indeed have a Christmas they would never forget.

Immediately after the Mass, the family and close friends progressed to Rosedale Cemetery, where Quinta would join her sister Mollie in rest. It was a simple burial, without fuss, as she would have wanted.

There was one other thing she had asked for. She wanted her death to be of service to her friends; “she could thus,” said Ethel sadly, “leave a parting gift to other victims.”35 And so Martland conducted an autopsy and discovered that Quinta had died from the same rare sarcoma that had killed Ella Eckert. Quinta’s may not have been on her shoulder, but it was the same thing; it was just that the radium had chosen a different target in her bones. Martland gave a statement about this new threat. “The bones of the victims,” he revealed, “had actually died before they did.”36

One might have thought that on learning of Quinta’s death—this woman the company doctors had professed was not going to die—the United States Radium Corporation might, at last, have softened. But one would be wrong. Berry did manage to win a settlement of $8,000 ($113,541) for Mae Canfield in the new year, but the company had a straitjacket clause attached. The only way they would pay his client any money, they said, was if Berry himself was incorporated into the deal. He was far too knowledgeable about their activities—and becoming far too skilled in court—to be left off a leash.

And so Raymond Berry, legal champion, the pioneering attorney who had been the only lawyer to answer Grace’s call for help, found himself forced into signing his name to the following statement: “I agree not to be connected with, directly or indirectly, any other cases against the United States Radium Corporation, nor to render assistance to any persons in any actions against said Company, nor to furnish data or information to any such persons in matters against said Company.”37

Berry was gone. He had been a serious fighter against the firm, an irksome thorn in their side. But now, with surgical precision, they had plucked him out and banished him.

They were two settlements down, but the United States Radium Corporation was winning the war.