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OTTAWA, ILLINOIS

—1930—

Catherine Wolfe gave a huge sigh and rubbed her hands in tiredness over her face and along her short dark hair. She watched idly as the clouds of radium dust flew up around her from the layer on her desk, disturbed by her discontented sigh. Then she returned reluctantly to weighing out the material for the girls. Catherine wasn’t a full-time dial-painter anymore; the change in her duties had been directed by the studio bosses.

They’d been good to her really, she thought; Mr. Reed had been so understanding. He’d called her in to see him one day last year and said that, on account of her poor health, she was to take a six-week vacation. Radium Dial knew that she was sickly and, as they had done with Margaret Looney, they were keeping a close eye on her.

Yet the vacation hadn’t helped. And so her job, eventually, had been changed. Her work now, in addition to weighing, was to scrape out the compound from the girls’ dishes, often simply using her fingernails. As was to be expected, her bare hands became “luminous bright,”1 and as it was her habit to run them through her hair, her whole head glowed fiercely. If anything, she often thought, when she peered at herself in a mirror in a dark bathroom, the new job got her even more covered in radium than the old one had.

It wasn’t as fun as painting had been, but then again Radium Dial was different: most of Catherine’s clique had left by now, only she, Marie Rossiter, and Marguerite Glacinski remained. Catherine tried to see her new role as a promotion: the radium was very valuable, so to be the worker chosen to distribute and salvage it was an accomplishment. After eight years’ employment, she was one of the most trusted workers.

Even so, she knew some girls gossiped about the reason for the change in her duties. “I believe,” said one of her colleagues, “she was transferred from dial-painting because she was a poor worker.”2

Not so poor that she didn’t still paint some dials, Catherine thought defensively. Every week there seemed to be some emergency order that required an extra pair of hands. Then Catherine would slip her brush between her lips, dip it in the powder, and paint; the girls all still did it that way at Radium Dial, for their instructions were never changed.

There was a sudden movement in the studio; Catherine looked up to see the girls going for medical tests. Catherine stood up to join them, but Mr. Reed intercepted her easily. “I was excluded from the examination,” Catherine remembered. “Mr. Reed told me not to go.”3

She had asked Mr. Reed personally several times now for examination by the company doctors, but was always refused. She’d gone to a local physician, and he’d told her that her limp was caused by rheumatism. Catherine felt she was too young for that; she was only twenty-seven. “I knew I was suffering from some disease, but what it was I did not know,”4 she said in frustration.

At least, she thought as she sat back down again with a heavy sigh, none of it had put off Tom Donohue. She gave a little smile at the thought of him. One day soon, she knew, they would marry. She allowed herself to daydream a little. Maybe they would have a family—though you couldn’t assume what blessings God would give you. Marie Rossiter had lost two babies already; she’d just discovered she was pregnant for the third time, and Catherine prayed fervently that this baby would survive.

Charlotte Purcell and her husband Al, too, had had a terrible time. They’d had a son, Donald (nicknamed Buddy), in August last year, but he’d come two months early and weighed only two and a half pounds. The doctors had kept him in an incubator for six weeks; at last, the little trooper had pulled through.

As Catherine sat lonely at her desk, the other girls gone to be examined, she felt disappointed at Mr. Reed’s rejection of her plea. Maybe she should do what Inez Vallat had done, she thought lightly. Inez had gone to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for examination, on account of her bad headaches and locking hips. Though she was only twenty-three, Inez was unable to work at all now; she’d lost twenty pounds over the past year and looked as skinny as anything when Catherine had seen her in church. More worryingly, her teeth had started coming loose and she now had an infected mouth; Inez had to hold a bandage constantly to her seeping jaw.

It was a bit like what Peg Looney had suffered, though she had died of diphtheria. Poor old Peg; she still missed her dreadfully. Catherine possibly didn’t know it, but Peg’s family had consulted a lawyer to bring suit against Radium Dial, just as Ella Cruse’s parents had done. (The Cruse case, incidentally, was still no further forward.)

“The family,” Peg’s sister said, with some understatement, “felt the death certificate was in error.”5

Their lawyer was a man named O’Meara. A single hearing was held in 1930, but nothing ever came of it; perhaps O’Meara ran into the same trouble as George Weeks. “No one would help us,”6 remembered Peg’s sister Jean.

“No one was willing to do anything about it,” her niece, Darlene, went on. “I don’t think any of the attorneys wanted to take on the company. My family felt like they couldn’t get any help from anywhere. They felt like they couldn’t be heard; that it didn’t matter.”7

Jean added: “My dad said at the end, ‘You can’t beat them. There’s no sense in trying.’”8

“My grandfather pretty much gave up,” conceded Darlene, “after he realized Peg was gone and there was nothing he could do to fight the company.”9

“Forget it,” Michael Looney would say, bitterly. “It’s not worth going through this kind of mess.”10

There was nothing he could do.

There was nothing the doctors could do, either, for Mary Vicini Tonielli. She had quit Radium Dial when she became sick; she had sciatica, she thought, but when she prodded gingerly at her back, she realized she had some kind of lump on her spine. “The doctor said it was a sarcoma,”11 Mary’s brother Alphonse later recalled.

Mary had had an operation on it in the fall of 1929. But sixteen weeks on, she was no better. In fact, Alphonse revealed, “She suffered like a dog for four months. There was never any more peace for her.”12

On February 22, 1930, Mary Tonielli died; she was twenty-one. Her husband of less than two years, Joseph, buried her in the Ottawa Avenue Cemetery.

“We thought it was radium poisoning,” said Alphonse bleakly. “But her husband and the old people didn’t investigate. They felt so bad about her death.”13