فصل 04

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Exactly one month after the Armistice, Quinta Maggia put those seize-the-day principles into action, marrying James McDonald. He was a cheery man of Irish heritage who worked as a chain-store manager. The newlyweds set up home in a two-story cottage; to begin with, Quinta was still dial-painting, but that didn’t last long. She left the firm in February 1919 and soon became pregnant; her daughter, Helen, would be born two days after Thanksgiving.

Nor was she the only dial-painter to depart. The war was over; the girls were growing up. Irene Corby also resigned, having landed a job as an office girl in New York City. Later, she would marry the rather dashing Vincent La Porte, a man with piercing blue eyes who worked in advertising.

Those who left were quickly replaced. Sarah Maillefer managed to get a position for her little sister, Marguerite Carlough, in August 1919. She was a dynamic young woman who wore rouge and lipstick and liked dramatic clothes: smart tailored coats with oversized lapels and wide-brimmed hats with feathered edges. Marguerite became best friends with the little sister of Josephine Smith, Genevieve, who had also started working there; another close friend was Albina Maggia, who was still slaving away over her trays of dials, having seen her younger sister marry ahead of her. Albina didn’t resent Quinta’s happiness, but she couldn’t help but wonder when her time might come; that summer, she too decided to leave, returning to hat-trimming.

It was a time of change all round. That same summer, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Grace Fryer, for one, couldn’t wait to make it count. At the plant, too, change was afoot: soon a new chemist—and future vice president—Howard Barker, together with von Sochocky, started playing around with the recipe of the luminous paint, substituting mesothorium for radium. A memo revealed: “Barker would just mix whatever he had around the place and sell it, 50–50 or 10 per cent [mesothorium] and 90 percent [radium], or whatever.”1 Mesothorium was an isotope of radium (dubbed radium-228 to denote its difference from the “normal” radium-226): also radioactive but with a half-life of 6.7 years, in contrast to radium-226’s 1,600 years. It was more abrasive than radium and—crucially for the firm—much cheaper.

In the studio, meanwhile, the girls, for some unknown reason, were asked to try a new technique. Edna Bolz remembered, “They passed little cloths around: we were supposed to wipe the brush on this little cloth instead of putting it in our mouth.”2 But within a month, Edna said, “They were taken away from us. We were not allowed to use the cloths; it wasted too much of the radium.”3 She concluded, “The lips were resorted to as the better way.”4

It was important to the company that the production process be as efficient as possible, because the demand for luminous products showed no signs of slowing, even now the war was over. In 1919, much to new treasurer Arthur Roeder’s delight, there was a production high: 2.2 million luminous watches. No wonder Katherine Schaub was feeling tired; that fall, she noticed “cracking and stiffness of her legs.”5 She was feeling in poor spirits generally, as her mother had passed away that year; Katherine became closer to her father, William, as they grieved.

Yet life, as Katherine’s orphaned cousin Irene Rudolph knew too well, goes on, even when those we love die. She and Katherine could do nothing but knuckle down to their jobs, alongside their fellow workers still toiling in the dust-filled studio: Marguerite Carlough and her sister Sarah Maillefer, Edna Bolz and Grace Fryer, Hazel Vincent and Helen Quinlan, Jennie Stocker and—still making everyone laugh—Ella Eckert and Mollie Maggia, who were in fact two of the fastest workers, despite their high jinks at the company socials. They played hard, but they were tough workers too. You had to be to keep your job.

Still the endless orders came. The company began to consider its postwar strategy. It resolved to expand its presence in the field of radium medicine; Arthur Roeder also oversaw the trademarking of “Undark.” Peacetime frivolity meant there were numerous products customers wanted to make glow in the dark: the company now sold its paint directly to consumers and manufacturers, who performed their own application. All this gave the radium firm another idea—they planned to set up in-house studios for watch manufacturers. This would dramatically reduce the dial-painting workforce in Orange, but the company would still profit by supplying the paint.

In fact, the firm had a compelling reason to want to leave Orange, or at least condense operations. The site’s position in the middle of a residential neighborhood was proving problematic now that the fervor of wartime patriotism had gone. The local residents started to complain that factory fumes discolored their laundry and affected their health. Company officials took the unusual step of appeasing the residents themselves: one executive gave a neighbor $5 ($68.50) compensation for her damaged washing.

Well, that was a mistake. It opened the floodgates. Next thing, all the residents wanted money. People in this poor community were “anxious to take advantage of the company.”6 The firm learned its lesson: it immediately drew the company purse strings tight, and not a single further dollar was paid out.

The executives turned their attention back to the watch-company studios. The demand for them was obvious; in 1920, luminous-watch production would surpass four million units. Arrangements were soon put in place and everyone was happy—everyone, it seemed, but the original dial-painters.

For while the company was doing well through the new agreement, it left the women out in the cold. There was simply not enough work coming in to keep them all employed. Demand dwindled until the Orange studio was running only on a part-time basis.

For the dial-painters, who were paid by the number of dials they did, it was an unsustainable situation. Their numbers decreased until there were fewer than a hundred women remaining. Helen Quinlan was one of those who got out, as did Katherine Schaub, in search of better-paid employment. Helen became a typist, while Katherine found a job in the office of a roller-bearing factory—and found that she loved it. “The girls at the office,” she wrote, “were a sociable crowd; they had a club which they invited me to join. Most of the girls embroidered or crocheted, making things for their hope-chests.”7

Hope-chests were also called dowry chests, and contained items collected by young single women in anticipation of marriage. In the spring of 1920, Katherine was eighteen, but she didn’t seem in any hurry to settle down; she liked the nightlife too much for that. “I wasn’t making anything for my hope-chest,” she wrote, “so while the girls worked, I played the piano and sang songs that were popular in those days.”8

Grace Fryer was also canny enough to see the writing on the wall. Dial-painting, for her, could only ever have been a stopgap job: it was something important to help the war effort, but it wasn’t a long-term proposition for someone of her skills. She set her sights high and was thrilled to secure a position at the Fidelity, a high-end bank in Newark. She loved traveling to her office, her dark hair neatly set and an elegant string of pearls around her neck, ready to get to grips with work that challenged her.

As with Katherine’s new colleagues, the girls at the bank were sociable; Grace was “the kind of girl who loved dancing and laughing,”9 and she and her new work friends often hosted dry parties, for Prohibition had begun in January 1920. Grace also liked to swim in her spare time, propelling her lithe body through the local swimming pool as she kept fit. She thought the future looked bright—and she wasn’t the only one. In Orange, Albina Maggia had met her man at last.

It felt so wonderful to be courting after waiting all this time. Just when she’d started to feel really old—she was twenty-five, years older than most girls wed at that time; and with a suddenly creaky left knee to boot—he had finally come along: James Larice, a bricklayer and Italian immigrant who’d moved to the United States aged seventeen. He was a war hero, awarded a Purple Heart and one oak leaf cluster. Albina started to allow herself to dream of marriage and children, of finally moving out of the family home.

Her sister Mollie, meanwhile, wasn’t waiting for any knight in shining armor to come for her. Independent-minded, confident, and unmarried, she left her family to board in an all-female house on Highland Avenue, a tree-lined street in Orange with beautiful detached homes. Mollie was still working at the radium company; one of the few girls left, but she was brilliant at her job and didn’t want to leave. Every morning she went to work full of energy and enthusiasm, which was more than she could say for some of her colleagues. Marguerite Carlough, who could normally be relied on for a laugh, kept saying she felt tired all the time; Hazel Vincent, meanwhile, felt so run-down that she decided to leave. She and Theo weren’t yet married, so she got herself a job with the General Electric Company.

But her new surroundings didn’t improve her condition. Hazel had no idea what was wrong with her: the weight was dropping off her, she felt weak, and her jaw ached something rotten. She was so concerned that in the end she asked the company doctor at her new firm to examine her, but he was unable to diagnose her illness.

The one thing she could be assured of, at least, was that it wasn’t her work with radium that was the cause. In October 1920, her former employer was featured in the local news. The residue from radium extraction looked like seaside sand, and the company had offloaded this industrial waste by selling it to schools and playgrounds to use in their children’s sandboxes; kids’ shoes were reported to have turned white because of it, while one little boy complained to his mother of a burning sensation in his hands. Yet, in comments that made reassuring reading, von Sochocky pronounced the sand “most hygienic”10 for children to play in, “more beneficial than the mud of world-renowned curative baths.”11

Katherine Schaub certainly had no qualms about returning to work for the radium firm when she was head-hunted at the end of November 1920 to train the new workers in the watch-company studios. These were mostly based in Connecticut, including at the Waterbury Clock Company. Katherine taught scores of girls the method she herself had learned: “I instructed them,” she said, “to put the brush in their mouth.”12

The new girls were excited to be working with radium, for the unstoppable craze continued, brought to fever pitch by a visit of Marie Curie to the United States in 1921. In January of that same year, as part of the constant press coverage of the element, von Sochocky penned an article for American magazine. “Locked up in radium is the greatest force the world knows,” he opined gravely: Through a microscope, you can see whirling, powerful, invisible forces, the uses of which”—he admitted—“we do not yet understand.”13 He added, as a cliffhanger on which to leave his readers: “What radium means to us today is a great romance in itself. But what it may mean to us tomorrow, no man can foretell.”14

In fact, no man can foretell much, von Sochocky included. And there was one event in particular that the doctor didn’t see coming: in the summer of 1921, he was frozen out of his own company. His cofounder, George Willis, had sold a large share of his stock to the company treasurer, Arthur Roeder; not long after that, both Willis and von Sochocky were unceremoniously ousted in a corporate takeover. The newly named United States Radium Corporation (USRC) seemed destined for great things in the postwar world, but von Sochocky wouldn’t be at the helm to guide it through whatever lay ahead.

Instead, it was Arthur Roeder who slipped graciously into the vacant president’s chair.